filters on complex data structures

I want to use filters on complex data structures such as JSON request bodies (used in for example Angular.js)

I wrote a unified function much like this:

<?php 

        function validate($input, $varname, $filters, $default) {
            $names = explode('.', $varname);
            $ptr = $input;
            foreach($names as $name) {
                if (is_array($ptr)) {
                    if (ctype_digit($name)) {
                        $index = intval($name);
                    } else {
                        $index = $name;
                    }
                    if (isset($ptr[$index])) {
                        $ptr = $ptr[$index];
                    } else {
                        return $default;
                    }
                } elseif (is_object($ptr)) {
                    if (isset($ptr->$name)) {
                        $ptr = $ptr->$name;
                    } else {
                        return $default;
                    }
                }
            }

            // filters
            $phfilter = new \Phalcon\Filter();
            foreach($filters as $filter) {
                $ptr = $phfilter->sanitize($ptr, $filter);
                if (!$ptr) {
                    return $default;
                }
            }

            return $ptr;
        }

I have two questions:

1. There is a mention in the documentation that you can also pass multiple filternames to sanitize(). How do I do that and in which order are these filters applied?

2. Is there a better way to do this then writing my own function?

As a remark: since most software vulnerabilities are a consequence of poorly filtered input data it would be most useful to have a simple sanitizing validation mechanism that checks for both existence and format of the input variables, stripping of all inappropriate tags and characters, and dismissing unexpected input alltogether. As this is a very common task it would be even more convenient to compress the code to a single function call such as I triy to do above.