Install How to install HTMLPurifier Being a library, there's no fancy GUI that will take you step-by-step through configuring database credentials and other mumbo-jumbo. HTMLPurifier is designed to run "out of the box." Regardless, there are still a couple of things you should be mindful of. 1. Including the proper files The library/ directory must be added to your path: HTMLPurifier will not be able to find the necessary includes otherwise. This is as simple as: set_include_path('/path/to/htmlpurifier/library' . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path()); ...replacing /path/to/htmlpurifier with the actual location of the folder. Don't worry, HTMLPurifier is namespaced so unless you have another file named HTMLPurifier.php, the files won't collide with any of your includes. Then, it's a simple matter of including the base file: require_once 'HTMLPurifier.php'; ...and you're good to go. 2. Preparing the proper environment While no configuration is necessary, you first should take precautions regarding the other output HTML that the filtered content will be going along with. Here is a (short) checklist: * Have I specified XHTML 1.0 Transitional as the doctype? * Have I specified UTF-8 as the character encoding? I cannot stress the importance of these two bullets enough. Omitting either of them could have dire consequences not only for security but for plain old usability. You can find a more in-depth discussion of why this is needed in docs/security.txt, in the meantime, try to change your output so this is the case. If, for some reason, you are unable to switch to UTF-8 immediately, you can switch HTMLPurifier's encoding. Note that the availability of encodings is dependent on iconv, and you'll be missing characters if the charset you choose doesn't have them. $config = HTMLPurifier_Config::createDefault(); $config->set('Core', 'Encoding', $encoding); 3. Using the code The interface is mind-numbingly simple: $purifier = new HTMLPurifier(); $clean_html = $purifier->purify($dirty_html); Or, if you're using the configuration object: $purifier = new HTMLPurifier($config); $clean_html = $purifier->purify($dirty_html); That's it. For more examples, check out docs/examples/. Also, SLOW gives advice on what to do if HTMLPurifier is slowing down your application.