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What is the safest way to accept user inputted programming code in PHP, store it in database and display it back with the HTML pre tag?
I currently convert the input to HTML entities, but I somehow think it wouldn’t be that easy…
Any suggestions?
Programming code is just text; if it’s not executed there can’t be any harm done.
This means you need to be concerned about:
Protecting your database from SQL injection. This can be done by escaping the input string (
mysql_real_escape_string()) or using prepared statements.Protecting your users from XSS. This can be done by converting your code to html entities (ie: using
htmlspecialchars()), so potentially malicious tags (ie:<script>) get converted to text (eg:<script>).