# Re: Beginning Ruby **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [October 26, 2006, 10:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-beginning-ruby/73769 "2006-10-26T22:46:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![phrogz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/2acd7d/32.png) [@phrogz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/phrogz)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2006, 10:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-beginning-ruby/73769/1 "2006-10-26T22:46:50Z")
From: phalcos [[mailto:removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)] > Im quite new to Ruby (unexpected heh?) but is currently planning on > building a website community with it just in order to see how powerful > it accually can be. Welcome! Are you planning on using any existing Ruby web framework (Rails, IOWA, RubyWeb, to name just a few) to build your website, or creating your own from scratch? > 1. How can I make sure the userinput only contains certain characters? > Like if I only want my users to be able to give me [A-Za-z0-9], is > regex the only alternative? Regex is not your only alternative, but certainly one of the more flexible/powerful. input.gsub!( /\W/, ‘’ ) # so easy! 🙂 A lot of the frameworks have their own ways to describe and auto-validate input for you. > 1. Is there any builtin method for converting html-characters > into safe input, like what htmlspecialchars in PHP does? See [Network and Web Libraries](http://phrogz.net/ProgrammingRuby/lib_network.html#CGI.escapeHTML) And again, Rails and others have their own helpers on this front. > 1. Methods for SQL database storage? Again, more helpers for the frameworks, like ActiveRecord for Rails. If you’re rolling your own, it depends on the database. Ruby’s DBI is a RDBMS-independent wrapper: [http://ruby-dbi.rubyforge.org/](http://ruby-dbi.rubyforge.org/) > 1. Anything else I should think about? Think about learning one of the popular frameworks. It may be a significant change from being used to handle every aspect of the development yourself, but you may find that you like the power and development speed that they give you.