Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries tagged security, php

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In what circumstances should one use “magic quotes” in PHP?

Absolutely never. Magic quotes was a badly designed feature, and PHP has been trying to escape its legacy for years. If you are constructing SQL strings using string concatenation you’re asking for trouble—use prepared statements or a library that interpolates and correctly escapes variables for you.

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Hashing client-side data

Via Scott, a clever PHP technique for ensuring data sent to the browser as a cookie or hidden form variable isn’t tampered with by the user:

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Magic quotes solution

Pink Goblin (otherwise known as HarryF) explains why magic quotes are evil. This is an issue that every PHP developer should be aware of, as it can cause all kinds of problems in your scripts if you ignore it. He suggests using a custom myAddSlashes() function which only calls addslashes() if magic quotes are turned off. I have an alternative solution—chose your preferred setting (quotes on or off) and apply it at run time to all incoming data in one go. My code for doing this is available here. By a bizzare coincidence I wrote the script this morning, then spotted a link to the Pink Goblin article on tidak ada literally five minutes after finishing it.

[... 130 words]

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