Universal Input Sanitizer

Universal Input Sanitizer is a compact and extensible toolkit designed to help developers clean, normalize, sanitize, and safely embed user-supplied values across different languages and environments. The project focuses on being lightweight, dependency-free, and easy to integrate into existing workflows.

It provides a simple Python API, a command-line tool, and a set of extensible helpers for masking sensitive data, escaping unsafe characters, and producing safe string literals for multiple programming languages.

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🔍 What does it do?

The Universal Input Sanitizer solves a common problem:
You receive input from users, logs, forms, APIs, configuration files, or third-party services, and you need to make sure the values are safe to store, print, embed, or reuse.

This toolkit provides:

• Sanitization
  Trims whitespace, normalizes strings, strips dangerous characters, and applies optional SQL/HTML-style escaping to reduce common injection vectors.

• Sensitive data masking
  Emails, phone numbers, access tokens, and URLs can be partially masked to avoid exposing private information in logs or debugging output.

• Language-safe literals
  Sometimes you need to safely embed values into different languages (Python, JS, Go, C#, Java, Bash...).
  The sanitizer converts strings into escaped, safe literals for each target language.

• Auto-detection of simple file types
  The CLI can process JSON files, .env files (KEY=VALUE format), or plain text, sanitizing each field with reasonable defaults.

This makes the tool useful for:

• log sanitization
• debugging and safe error reporting
• template generation
• config validation
• pipeline preprocessing
• data ingestion
• CLI tools and dev utilities

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🧠 How it works (technical overview)

The sanitizer works in three simple stages:

1. Input Identification
   The CLI (or API) inspects the input.

   • JSON → parsed and sanitized key-by-key
   • .env files → split into key=value pairs
   • Plain text → treated as a single raw value

2. Sanitization Pipeline
   A small chain of transformations is applied:

   • Strip/normalize whitespace
   • Remove control characters
   • Optional SQL/HTML-style escaping
   • Pattern-based masking (email, phone, URL, tokens)
   • Generic text cleaning for unsafe sequences

   These transformations live in sanitizer.py and are intentionally simple to modify.

3. Language-Safe Literal Generation (optional)
   If a target language is requested (--languages python javascript bash ...),
   the value is encoded into a safe literal:

   • Quotes escaped
   • Backslashes normalized
   • Shell-unsafe characters escaped
   • Language-specific wrapper formats applied

The entire pipeline is dependency-free (pure Python) and easy to extend.

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✨ Features

• Detects simple file types: JSON, .env, plain text
• Sanitizes and masks:
  • emails
  • phone numbers
  • URLs
  • generic text
  • basic HTML/SQL unsafe characters
• Produces escaped literals for: Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, C#, Swift, Bash
• Includes:
  • CLI
  • Python API
  • Examples
  • Unit tests
  • Zero external dependencies

The codebase is intentionally minimal and built for extension.

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🚀 Quick start

# Optional: create a virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install (no deps required unless you add your own)
pip install -r requirements.txt