Using Wordpress, can some one tell me the best way of sanitizing input?

[admin]

I'm developing an application using Wordpress as a CMS.

I have a form with a lot of input fields which needs to be sanitized before stored in the database.<br>
I want to prevent SQL injection, having javascript and PHP code injected and other harmful code.

Currently I'm using my own methods to sanitize data, but I feel that it might be better to use the functions which WP uses.

I have looked at <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation" rel="noreferrer">Data Validation</a> in Wordpress, but I'm unsure on how much of these functions I should use, and in what order. Can anyone tell what WP functions are best to use?

Currently I'm "sanitizing" my input by doing the following:

<ol>
<li>Because characters with accents (é, ô, æ, ø, å) got stored in a funny way in the Database (even though my tables are set to

ENGINE=InnoDB

,

DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

and

COLLATE=utf8_danish_ci

), I'm now converting input fields that can have accents, using htmlentities(). </li>
<li>When creating the SQL string to input the data, I use

mysql_real_escape_string()

.</li>
</ol>

I don't think this is enough to prevent attacks though. So suggestions to improvement is greatly appreciated.