Let’s say you have a form on your website where users can submit comments. when the form is submitted, you want to sanitize the comment text before it its display on your website.
But why, Without sanitization, user input can contain HTML or JavaScript code that can be executed by the browser when the content is displayed on the website. This can allow attackers to inject malicious code into your website and potentially steal user data, compromise your website’s security, or redirect users to other malicious websites. Move to solution
So lets look into how to secure our site.
sanitize_text_field() is a WordPress function that is used to sanitize a sanitize a string for use in HTML or text content. This function removes potentially harmful characters or tags from the string and returns a sanitized version of the string.
Here’s how sanitize_text_field() works in more detail:
1. Remove unwanted characters: the ‘sanitize_text_field()‘ function removes unwanted characters from the input string, including HTML tags, script tags, and special characters that could be used for XSS attacks.
2. Encodes special characters: The function also encodes special characters such as ampersands and less-than signs into their HTML entities to prevent them from being interpreted as HTML tags.
3. Returns sanitized string: Finally, the `sanitize_text_field()` function returns a sanitized version of the input string that can be safely used in HTML or text content.
Here’s how you can do this using sanitize_text_field() for above situation
// Get the comment text from the form submission
$comment_text = $_POST['comment_text'];
// Sanitize the comment text using sanitize_text_field()
$sanitized_comment_text = sanitize_text_field( $comment_text );
// Use the sanitized comment text in your WordPress template
echo '<p>' . $sanitized_comment_text . '</p>';
In this example, $_POST['comment_text'] contains the raw text submitted by the user. We then pass this text to sanitize_text_field() to sanitize it and remove any unwanted characters. Finally, we use the sanitized comment text in our WordPress template by echoing it in a paragraph tag.
In summary, sanitize_text_field() is an important function in WordPress that helps ensure the security of your website by sanitizing user input before it is displayed on the front-end. It is commonly used when handling form submissions, user comments, or any other situation where user input is displayed on your website.
Thanks for Reading.