Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52860&edit=1
ID: 52860 Updated by: cataphr...@php.net Reported by: cataphr...@php.net Summary: htmlspecialchars/htmlentities stripping invalid characters Status: Open Type: Feature/Change Request Package: *General Issues Operating System: Irrelevant PHP Version: trunk-SVN-2010-09-16 (SVN) Block user comment: N New Comment: Relevant for HTML 4: http://www.webreference.com/dlab/books/html/3-4.html#3-4-1 Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-09-18 16:54:09] cataphr...@php.net HTML5 follows the same direction: 8.1.4 Character references [...] The numeric character reference forms described above are allowed to reference any Unicode code point other than U+0000, U+000D, permanently undefined Unicode characters (noncharacters), and control characters other than space characters. 8.2.2.3 Preprocessing the input stream [...] All U+0000 NULL characters and code points in the range U+D800 to U+DFFF in the input must be replaced by U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTERs. Any occurrences of such characters and code points are parse errors. Any occurrences of any characters in the ranges U+0001 to U+0008, U+000E to U+001F, U+007F to U+009F, U+FDD0 to U+FDEF, and characters U+000B, U+FFFE, U+FFFF, U+1FFFE, U+1FFFF, U+2FFFE, U+2FFFF, U+3FFFE, U+3FFFF, U+4FFFE, U+4FFFF, U+5FFFE, U+5FFFF, U+6FFFE, U+6FFFF, U+7FFFE, U+7FFFF, U+8FFFE, U+8FFFF, U+9FFFE, U+9FFFF, U+AFFFE, U+AFFFF, U+BFFFE, U+BFFFF, U+CFFFE, U+CFFFF, U+DFFFE, U+DFFFF, U+EFFFE, U+EFFFF, U+FFFFE, U+FFFFF, U+10FFFE, and U+10FFFF are parse errors. These are all control characters or permanently undefined Unicode characters (noncharacters). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-09-16 16:45:10] cataphr...@php.net Where it says "invalid in XML or XHTML are not stripped out" it should read "invalid in XML or HTML are not stripped out". The characters are also invalid in HTML. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-09-16 13:57:42] cataphr...@php.net Description: ------------ htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities() are commonly used to convert user-supplied text into text that's safe to output in an HTML or XML document. Actually, they are insufficient for this purpose, because characters that are invalid in XML or XHTML are not stripped out. In HTML, this results in an invalid document. In XML, the result is worse because one will end-up with malformed XML. Therefore, sanitation with htmlspecialchars can result in corrupted data. Additionaly, when passed $double_encode == true, invalid character entities (i.e. those which refer to invalid characters) should also be stripped out. See * http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-Char * http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-CharRef Test script: --------------- <?php $mode = @$_GET["mode"]; if ($mode == "xhtml") { header("Content-type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"); $templ = <<<XML <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Test</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" /> </head> <body> %s </body> </html> XML; } elseif ($mode == "html") { header("Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8"); $templ = <<<HTML <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Test</title> </head> <body> %s </body> </html> HTML; } else die("bad mode"); $data = "My data: <\x1F"; echo sprintf($templ, htmlentities($data, ENT_NOQUOTES, "UTF-8")); Expected result: ---------------- At minimum, this should be documented in the manual pages for htmlspecialchars and htmlentities. A better solution would be to change those two functions to strip characters outside the allowed range: #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF] Another alternative, which wouldn't break BC, would be to add another function or another flag to htmlentities/htmlspecialchars (in addition to ENT_NOQUOTES/ENT_QUOTES/ENT_COMPAT) that would strip out these characters, possible plus those that authors are "encouraged to avoid": [#x7F-#x84], [#x86-#x9F], [#xFDD0-#xFDEF], [#x1FFFE-#x1FFFF], [#x2FFFE-#x2FFFF], [#x3FFFE-#x3FFFF], [#x4FFFE-#x4FFFF], [#x5FFFE-#x5FFFF], [#x6FFFE-#x6FFFF], [#x7FFFE-#x7FFFF], [#x8FFFE-#x8FFFF], [#x9FFFE-#x9FFFF], [#xAFFFE-#xAFFFF], [#xBFFFE-#xBFFFF], [#xCFFFE-#xCFFFF], [#xDFFFE-#xDFFFF], [#xEFFFE-#xEFFFF], [#xFFFFE-#xFFFFF], [#x10FFFE-#x10FFFF]. Actual result: -------------- The W3C validator gives an error: You have used an illegal character in your text. HTML uses the standard UNICODE Consortium character repertoire, and it leaves undefined (among others) 65 character codes (0 to 31 inclusive and 127 to 159 inclusive) that are sometimes used for typographical quote marks and similar in proprietary character sets. The validator has found one of these undefined characters in your document. The character may appear on your browser as a curly quote, or a trademark symbol, or some other fancy glyph; on a different computer, however, it will likely appear as a completely different character, or nothing at all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52860&edit=1