It is easier to validate against data for what you do want, rather than trying to filter out what you don't. The best way to think about this, is to use the analogy of a night club guest list.

A night club uses a "guest list" to match those who they want to allow entry -- say 200 people. This is far easier to implement than using a "not-a-guest list", because that list would have to account for every person who is not wanted in the club -- which would be impossible to maintain with a population of 6.4 billion. But, this is exactly what many programmers try to do in their code.

They "scrub" the input, using various replacement routines on any invalid characters. The problem is, as in our night club analogy, that you can't foresee new additions that may arise in the future -- new exploits. So the better method is to only allow characters through that you deem valid. These would included letters, numbers, hyphens, periods, apostrophes, etc. And even better, you can accomplish this in one line with a regular expression:

$mystring = preg_replace("/([^'\-_.@A-z0-9\s])/","", $mystring);

This line is a catch-all, but you could build on this code by creating a function that uses a switch statement and multiple regular expressions that validate on specific strings like phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, etc.

See my VBScript version of the same example.

Take a look at my previous write up from the Downloads Page: Link

You can do this simply by adding a MIME type directive for PHP to a .htaccess file in the root directory of your website.

1) Create the .htaccess file with your favorite text editor and add the following line:

          AddType application/x-httpd-php .asp

This directive treats ASP files as if they were PHP files.

2) Run chmod 644 .htaccess to allow public read permissions

3) The next step can be done in two ways: A or B.

A: The fastest is to create a symbolic link for the PHP file with an ASP extension. This side-steps the browser redirection and makes it appear to the user that they are in fact accessing the requested ASP file.

          ln -s myfile.php myfile.asp

B: But since you wanted an email to be sent to you, you'll need to create the ASP file and add the PHP code to it. You can use the sample below:

         $refer=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
         $script=$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'];

         $ebody="RefURL: $refer\nPage: $script\n";

         mail("you@domain.com", "* * Redirect Notice * *", $ebody);

         header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
         header("Location: ./about.php");
         exit();


In this example, an email is sent with the referring page that displayed your outdated link and the name of the ASP file. The script then redirects to the new PHP file.

Remember to run chmod on myfile.asp and set it to 645.

The BIOS on your notebook is outdated. You'll need to flash your BIOS to the latest version 7.7 which you can download from Toshiba (Info Page) or from our site if the file becomes unavailable.