Using multiple filter flags in PHP is easy, but the documentation does not explain it well.
The Filter capabilities in PHP 5.3 and above are very powerful and save a ton of effort, but the passing of flags to various filter functions is described minimally as a “bitwise disjunction of flags”. This means you need to pass a bitwise conjunction of flags.
Here’s the english translation:
Pass a pipe-separated list of flags.
That’s it. You need to use the logical ‘OR’ to create a parameter the parser will understand.
If you want to use filter_var() to sanitize $string with FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING and pass in FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_HIGH and FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_LOW, just call it like this:
$string = filter_var($string, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING, FILTER_FLAG_NO_ENCODE_QUOTES | FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_HIGH | FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_LOW);
That’s it. Nothing magical.
The same goes for passing a flags field in an options array in the case of using callbacks. Here is an extended version of the example from php.net:
$var = filter_var($string, FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS,
array('flags' => FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_LOW | FILTER_FLAG_ENCODE_HIGH));
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