I am currently working on a personal project. The entire site is dynamic so I am requesting all sorts of information from the database on all pages. I noticed that I was duplicating specific code to display the data to the pages. A few examples would be applying htmlspecialchars to the data or iterating through to set image paths, etc.
What i am wondering is if this is a bad decision to make so I can course correct early on. Most internet resources have said that the controller manipulates while the model fetches, updates, inserts, etc. into db. BUT it just makes sense at least for me anyway to manipulate the output data via model since all pages will use it in the same way.
No. A model merely represents data, whether that came from a database, an XML file, a web service/API, or even just an array.
If you find yourself doing the same thing over, then it’s time to re-factor and DRY your code out. For things like sanitising data, you would normally have a presenter that takes your model, and returns it data sanitised however you wish. That way the model has its single responsibility (represent data), and your present had a single responsibility of transforming data.