You absolutely may need and want to transform data. You don't want to store code unmodified in a database; that's how you end up with SSTI or stored XSS. You e

You absolutely may need and want to transform data. You don't want to store code unmodified in a database; that's how you end up with SSTI or stored XSS. You encode special characters in a simple, reversible way (as one example). Similarly, you don't store passwords untransformed in a db, you hash them. That's a transform. There are tons of examples like this.