Question

I’m trying to clean up form input using the following Perl transliteration:

sub ValidateInput {
 my $input = shift;
 $input =~ tr/a-zA-Z0-9_@.:;',#$%&()\/\\{}[]?! -//cd;
 return $input;
}

The problem is that this transliteration is removing embedded newline characters that users may enter into a textarea field which I want to keep as part of the string. Any ideas on how I can update this to stop it from removing embedded newline characters? Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Thanks for the help guys! Ultimately I decided to process all the data in our database to remove the character that was causing the issue so that any text that was submitted via our update form (and not changed by the user) would match what was in the database. Per your suggestions I also added a few additional allowed characters to the validation regex.