#5791 closed enhancement (maybelater)
End the Escape Madness in wp-settings.php
| Reported by: |
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Owned by: | |
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| Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
| Severity: | normal | Version: | |
| Component: | General | Keywords: | needs-patch |
| Focuses: | Cc: |
Description
Mixing things up is well - mixing things up. I know it's very hard, the damn fukne hard way to realize this years later and then confront yourself with an installation-base you just have left all over the planet. I think any PHP coder knows about such issues. One of them for me is the by me so called
magic-quotes-complex.
there was a time when you needed to check at the very beginning of your code wether magic_quotes_gpc was on or off. do you remember? gosh that was a time!
so everybody who had no access to the php configuration put some if clause in their code checking for get_magic_quotes_gpc() and then unslashing the request vars if they were slashed.
then time passed by.
things changed.
php evolved.
it was talked much about php.
at the end of a very long and deep discussion process, php devs decided to throw magic_quotes out of their codebase because it created a lot of chaos while proving no use.
some time ago, some authors thought: hmm how to end the madness? they were very-very clever: not only cheking for by-php-added-slashes and then removing-them-all only to add-slashes-all-over-again. shortly said: escaping the escaping-madess and leaving an ever bigger madness.
dear wordpress devs. when can we end this? i know it's hard to realise but whouldn't it be possible to throw this second escaping all over anything-by-request leaving the programmers a chance to know what kind of data they are dealing with? i don't want to rant but what about providing at least a known version number or a global configuration setting sothat a plugin author knows wether form input is useless-slashed or not? adding slashes at the very beginning does not help anyone, it was a fault to think that it reduces attacks.
Change History (10)
#2
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16 years ago
I'd love to remove the escaping, but that would cause huge back compat problems for plugins. Maybe someday, but it will take a big, coordinated effort.
#3
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16 years ago
That's why I suggested to have a kind of global flag that can be checked or a function that always returns the unescaped data. Then plugin authors can migrate (never will everyone update all the same time) and wordpress can as well.
There are a few issues with the way magic quotes is handled, but that code has been battle tested for quite a while now. I agree it could be simplified, but that is about it.