Adam Jensen has a new post to his blog today looking at a solution he's created to be able to access the raw input a user has entered.

I've run into a minor problem, and I'm not sure my solution is particularly ideal. See, the Zend_Form approach described above does a great job of implementing Chris Shiflett's Filter Input, Escape Output principle...user input is filtered for invalid HTML before it's ever saved to the model, and can then be escaped as appropriate in the view layer. But what happens if you need to be able to retrieve the user's original unfiltered input later?

While working with the raw data could be dangerous, he has created a custom model that, through the getters and setters and doing validation/sanitization and the presentation layer rather than behind the scenes. It's not ideal but he's willing to take suggestions...