HTMLPurifier just saved me countless hours

Written October 27, 2008 in php, webdev

Jump to comments

I’d been in the middle of writing my own classes to handle purifying some crappy HTML that a client project sent my way, but HTMLPurifier for PHP just saved me a lot of time by providing exactly what I needed.

If it doesn’t make sense to you right off, you do need to read the INSTALL file for once. That will tell you exactly how to use it.

I love when I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I wish more developers felt this way.

2 comments on ' HTMLPurifier just saved me countless hours '

Code reusability makes the web go round
Many times a true developer’s work is not to reinvent the pieces but to connect them into the application.

Written by Colnector on October 28, 2008 at 4:06am
Karl, couldn’t agree with you more. Re-inventing the wheel for anything other than purely educational purposes is pretty dumb (from the stand-point of developer tools). However, many people choose to try to offer a more usable or better looking or faster performing version of this or that commercial product. That is competition, and , at least in theory, keeps us from having nothing but mountains of crappy software.

It has been my experience that developers re-invent the wheel most often because they don’t know the wheel has been invented. There are probably a great many well written tools that are just poorly publicized. Another big reason for re-inventing tools is that they aren’t cross platform or can’t easily be invoked in anything but the language they were written in.

Written by Robert Stackhouse on October 28, 2008 at 8:46am