Laravel 5 XSS protection middleware

XSSProtection.php

class XSSProtection
{
    /**
     * The following method loops through all request input and strips out all tags from
     * the request. This to ensure that users are unable to set ANY HTML within the form
     * submissions, but also cleans up input.
     *
     * @param Request $request
     * @param callable $next
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle(Request $request, \Closure $next)
    {
        if (!in_array(strtolower($request->method()), ['put', 'post'])) {
            return $next($request);
        }
        
        $input = $request->all();

        array_walk_recursive($input, function(&$input) {
            $input = strip_tags($input);
        });

        $request->merge($input);

        return $next($request);
    }
}

We're using htmlspecialchars in our project because of what @jackyef mentioned.

// Encode <, > and & as their HTML5 entity equivalent, leaving quotes, accented
// and special characters untouched.
$input = htmlspecialchars($input, ENT_NOQUOTES | ENT_HTML5);

I'm also thinking of replacing every EOL with a single char \n style to ensure character counts aren't failing because of this.

$input = preg_replace('~\r\n?~', "\n", $input);

Hi. I introduced an arrangement that removes all special characters.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Redirect;
use Closure;

class XSS
{
    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Closure  $next
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        $url = str_replace($request->url(), "", $request->fullUrl());
        $input = $request->all();

        array_walk_recursive($input, function (&$input) {
            $input = strip_tags($input);
        });

        if (preg_match('/[\'^£$%&*()}{@#~><>|_+¬-]/', $url))
            return redirect($request->url() . "/" . preg_replace('/[\'^£$%&*()}{@#~><>|_+¬-]/',"",strip_tags($url)));

        $request->merge($input);
        return $next($request);
    }
}