Accepting and display special characters safely

Question

I know this has been said before, and most likely a duplicate, but I'm having trouble consolidating all the information I'm finding.

I have input boxes that store information. I'd like to allow the user to type in anything they want, and display it. However, if it happens to be something like <?php die(); ?> <?php die(); ?> , I obviously don't want it to execute.

I know there are things like htmlspecialchars() , however, if a user types something like <b> it will display <b> instead.

Is there a way around this?

Answer 1

<?php
$string = '<?php echo "aaa;"?><b>sss</b>';
print "before: ". htmlspecialchars($string). "<br>";


print "after: ". cleanInput($string);

function cleanInput($input) {
    $output = strip_tags($input, '<p><a><b><div>');
    return htmlspecialchars($output);
}

where <p><a><b><div> are the allowable tags. this is good so, you can only set which tags you want to allow. This will also strip <script> and other tags

Read: http://php.net/strip_tags