[Mediawiki-l] escaping user input

I am creating a custom special page to gather some information from user. I have create a table to store the data in and am trying to use the Database object to access it. This all works fine, but I need to validate the user input. I would like to use mysql_real_escape_string to avoid sql injection, but there does not seem to be any function in the Database object to escape a string. I suspect there is an easy way to do this since mediawiki accepts a lot of user input. Anyone know what the best way to go about escaping user input is within the mediawiki architecture? Thank you, Paul