How do you filter/clean user entered data?

There's a laravel package for html purifier, also blade handles some purification.

@thebigk

Laravel uses PDO so you don't have to worry about SQL Injections. If you output the data, blade does encode all {{ HTML }} as text.

Laravel Validates all requests by creating what they call requests. The documentation can be found here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/validation#form-request-validation

All forms should be validated before you insert data into the database.

Also if you are entering data into a database through a GET request, make sure to sanitize the data before you attempt to insert it. PHP sanitation through filter_var:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.filter-var.php

I'm not sure how did I skip the Form Request Validation part! :/ . I think it's time to rewrite the duplicate work I did in my controllers.

@jlrdw - I do make use of HTML Purifier. My only complaint with blade {{ }} is that it turns & into &, which looks bad. I'm therefore using {!! html_entity_decode($text) !!}; but not sure if it's safe.

@tpane24 - Thank you for letting me know about filter var. I can definitely make use of it at places.