Question

Need advice on what to name functions that do this

• Perform operations on strings before inserting into db to protect from MySQL injection
• Converts HTML special characters

Ex:

enter_db()
exit_db()

However, these function names sound kinda corny. Any suggestions or advice on other names? Thanks!

Answer 1

My database connection generally resides in a wrapper, so there’s a bit of context for the functions:

//escapes data using standard methods - ie. mysql_real_escape_string()
$db->escapeData();

It sounds like you’re making these functions external as part of a procedural library, and they do a little extra work on the string, so I’d probably go with something like:

sanitizeDbData();

I’m a PHP programmer, and PHP has a built in htmlspecialchars() function. It’s got a nice simplicity to it. If you’re not using PHP, I’d simply make htmlSpecialChars() the conversion function, or possibly htmlEntities().