Preventing cross site scripting

I am currently writing a web application that, as a small part of it, needs to display an email message. Obviously the message is potentially in html format, which to display could be sent straight to the browser.

I would like to know the best way of filtering out undesirable html. I understand the best way is to only allow acceptable information, in this case all the different html formatting tags.

However, there is a lot of tags that are acceptable. Another approach would be to strip out all the bad stuff such as <SCRIPT>, <OBJECT>, <APPLET>, and <EMBED> but this is far from ideal because of new tags becoming available and so on.

Are there any functions available (for php) that will take a html page as input and strip out all nasty stuff? Does anyone have suggestions as to how to do this as easy as possible?

Thanks,

Andrew Beverley Received on Thu Jun 19 22:05:40 2003