PHP Form Question

Question

Is there a way I can check if a user enters a <p> tag inside a form using PHP?

Answer 1

If you simply want to strip all markup use:

strip_tags ( string $str [, string $allowable_tags ] )

otherwise:

substr_replace ( $string , string $replacement , int $start [, int $length ] )

Depends on why you what to know

1 - PHP.net

Answer 2

If it is posted, you can do something like strstr of '<p>' or one of the similar functions, which will then return the location if it exists or NULL if it doesn't.

<?php if ( strstr ( $body, '<p>' ) == NULL )
echo 'All Clear';
else die ( 'Contains <p>' );

Answer 3

if(empty($_POST['foo'])) {
 print "Foo empty";
} else { 
 if(stristr($_POST['foo'], '<p>')) {
 print "Contains P tag";
 } else {
 print "No P tag";
 }
}

• mr. w: Before doing this, you'd want to check that isset($_POST['foo']); is true, else you'll get an undefined index notice.
• Paulo Scardine: use the strifoo functions to catch both <P> and <p>.

Answer 4

You could use javascript or jquery .onFocus event.

• cssNUT: I really would like to use PHP.
• Kenny: ahh I see. I assumed you wanted to know when a control inside the <p> tag was in focus or not.

Answer 5

Assuming they don't enter anything fancy like <p class="stuff">, you can use a simple strpos() call:

$text = $_POST['name_of_field'];
if (strpos($text, '<p>') !== FALSE) {
 die("No <p> tags allowed");
}

If they enter attributes, then you'd most likely need a regex, which has its own basket of problems:

$text = $_POST['name_of_field'];
if (preg_match('/<p.*?>/i', $text)) {
 die("No <p> tags allowed");
}

Answer 6

Is this what you mean? Assuming you have the form content in a string variable, something like this should work:

<?php
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL | E_STRICT);
$string1 = 'Hello <p> world';
$string2 = 'Hello world';
$foundIt1 = strripos($string1, '<p>');
$foundIt2 = strripos($string2, '<p>');
if (false === $foundIt1) {
 echo '1. didn\'t find it';
} else {
 echo "1. found it at offset $foundIt1";
}
echo "\n";
if (false === $foundIt2) {
 echo '2. didn\'t find it';
} else {
 echo "2. found it at offset $foundIt2";
}
?>

Answer 7

If you want to replace or remove them:

$new_data = preg_replace("/<p>/", "whatever you want to replace it with here", $_POST['form_field_id_here']);

If you just want to check for them

strpos("<p>", $_POST['form_field_id_here']);

Then read this to make sure you aren't leaving your site open to attackers: What's the best method for sanitizing user input with PHP?

(Edit: I know, I know. No regex for HTML parsing. IMHO, if all you are doing is checking for

tags then a little bit of regex is better than using a huge HTML parser. That said, if you are checking for many tags and things like <p class="something"> then you should look at this: http://docs.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtml.php )