There'a a right and a wrong way to approach this. The (usually) wrong way is to try and set up an input sanitation method (like a script) and hope that nothing gets through. It usually doesn't work.
What I recommend you to do is rewrite your PHP SQL queries to use MySQLi prepared statements. These are queries that are first converted from the common SQL syntax ("SELECT... WHERE...") to a statement your engine can work with, and only then are the fields replaced with your input, thus preventing SQL injection.
For example, the (very) susceptible SQL syntax:
"SELECT * FROM users_passwords WHERE user='" + user + "' AND pass='" + password + "'"
Can be converted to the following prepared statement:
"SELECT * FROM users_passwords WHERE user=? AND password=?"
And then, using the command bind_param()
, you can safely replace the ?
placeholders with your parameters after the statement is prepared. While the original SQL query allows you to use some basic injection techniques (like writing ' OR true OR '), prepared statements will not allow this.
Here's a working example:
// Create a new MySQLi connection object
$db = new mysqli('localhost','db_username','db_password','db_name');
// Create a new prepared statement
$stmt = $db->prepare('SELECT * FROM users_passwords WHERE user=? AND pass=?');
// Bind the parameters, in order, to the statement (s stands for string)
$stmt->bind_param('ss', username, password);
// Self-explanatory
$stmt->execute();