HTMLPurifier just saved me countless hours
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
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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.
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.