sanitize

• sanitise

From sanitary. By surface analysis, sanity +‎ -ize.

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈsænətaɪz/, /ˈsænɪtaɪz/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

sanitize (third-person singular simple present sanitizes, present participle sanitizing, simple past and past participle sanitized)

1. (transitive) To rid of microorganisms by cleaning or disinfecting.
3. (transitive, by extension) To make something, such as a dramatic work, more acceptable by removing potentially offensive material.

   Near-synonym: bowdlerize

   • 2007 November 4, Stephen L. Carter, “Almost a Gentleman”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     And yet for all that, the filmmakers were in fact trying to sanitize Mitchell’s novel.

   • 2024 November 17, Zach Vasquez, “Saturday Night Live: Charli xcx has fun in otherwise middle of the road episode”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:

     Both caricatures are appropriately mean, but if the show is going to continue using them, it needs to take care not to sanitize the real people, as it has done with dangerously incompetent and malicious figures in the past, such as George W Bush or Trump himself.

5. (transitive, computing) To filter (text) to ensure it does not contain any characters that will cause problems for or be interpreted in an adverse way by the receiving system.

   Remember to sanitize your query parameters to avoid SQL injection exploits.

6. (transitive, computing) To remove sensitive or personal data from (a database or file).
7. (transitive) To revise (a document) in order to prevent identification of the sources.

• sanitizer

• sanitary
• sanitation

• satinize