First, I'm sorry if this has been brought up before.. and I haven't done any googling on the subject because it's completely over my head and I'm not sure where to start.
But I'm curious and wanted a bit of quick advice on the topic of sanitizing input for security.
Are there standard ways of doing this? Is there any documentation on it?
Are there libraries which help with this kind of thing?
I ask because an internal rails app at work broke horribly and mysteriously.. all because of a single quote in a text field. Whoops, it was a new feature that was rushed out. (testing, what's that?)
That's bad enough, but if it were a public-facing application it feels as though this kind of thing is a hole which could be abused.
I know there are some basic security settings for Ruby itself which would come in handy for sandboxing off certain parts, but my intuition still says that there's a problem which could be solved.
Is there a problem? If so, how can it be solved?