The Sanisoft blog has a new post today about a handy PHP utility you can use to put a "firewall" in your PHP application - Inspekt.

Everyone knows that you should filter your inputs most of the good programmers do it but when you are working with a large team of programmers on an open source project things slip up, errors do creep in, at times like this you wish for a mechanism which would prevent your team from making such mistakes, some thing which forces them to declare their intent.

One solution he mentions is the input_filter extension for PHP5, but this doesn't help most users since it's normally off by default and PHP5-only. The other solution, Inspekt, a modified version of the Zend_Filter_input component of the Zend Framework. An example is included and a list of filtering methods is too (like getAlnum, getDigits and getInt).