string sanitizer for filename

php string sanitization
user151841 picture user151841 · Jan 7, 2010 · Viewed 149.4k times · Source

I'm looking for a php function that will sanitize a string and make it ready to use for a filename. Anyone know of a handy one?

( I could write one, but I'm worried that I'll overlook a character! )

Edit: for saving files on a Windows NTFS filesystem.

Answer

Sean Vieira picture Sean Vieira · Jan 7, 2010

Making a small adjustment to Tor Valamo's solution to fix the problem noticed by Dominic Rodger, you could use:

// Remove anything which isn't a word, whitespace, number
// or any of the following caracters -_~,;[]().
// If you don't need to handle multi-byte characters
// you can use preg_replace rather than mb_ereg_replace
// Thanks @Łukasz Rysiak!
$file = mb_ereg_replace("([^\w\s\d\-_~,;\[\]\(\).])", '', $file);
// Remove any runs of periods (thanks falstro!)
$file = mb_ereg_replace("([\.]{2,})", '', $file);

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