How To Escape Multi-Dimensional Array Data in PHP

Came across an interesting problem recently building a web app for a client where I had a multi-dimensional array coming through via the $_POST data.

Of course to use this in your PHP code you should first filter it to protect against SQL injection attacks and XSS script attacks.

I came across this code from corprocat.com. A good start, but it wasn’t quite what I needed. Specifically I wanted to filter multi-dimensional arrays of N levels.

Here’s my modified version:

function filterData($data) {
	if (is_array($data)) {
		foreach ($data as $elem) {
			filterData($elem);
		}
	} else {
		$data = trim(htmlentities(strip_tags($data)));
		if (get_magic_quotes_gpc())
			$data = stripslashes($data);
 
		$data = mysql_real_escape_string($data);
	}
 
    return $data;
}

Feel free to use it in your PHP web apps to escape multi-dimensional array data.