Cleaning up posted variables before saving.

[Admin]

I want to get the cleanest (ie. no extra spaces, no HTML, etc) values possible when a form is submitted. I am currently using the following functions.

strip_tags : remove HTML tags
trim : remove white space
str_replace : attempt to remove double spaces between words

is there anything else i can do with my values? these are all i can think of.

[sde]

what kind of input is this for? are characters like !#$%^&*()|\/[]{} ok?

[Admin]

its for the web. yes, those all are acceptable.

[sde]

i can't think of anything else then.