Making sure users' posts close HTML tags

Anon

Hi.

I have a forum-type page where users can post text.

The contents of the posts are all listed on the page, somewhat like a guestbook.

Here's where the problem lies: Although I strip_tags() with most HTML tags on their posts, I allow them to use certain ones such as hyperlink and bold and italics. The problem lies in the fact that once in a while a user will screw up their html and their tag will spill onto the rest of the page.

I've been searching for a php command to make sure all the HTML tags in a string are closed by the end of the string.

I don't believe it's in the normal library. Does anyone have any suggestions or have been faced with this problem before?

Thank you,

Harlan

Anon

Here is an idea. Since you only allow a few html commands, you could search the string and count all the <a, and count all the </a> and make sure the numbers match up. If not send the user back to the form saying a link is not closed.

Thats an idea, I havent looked at how the search would work, but using the strpos() function to find the position of the beginning of the tag and from there increment until the next tag to count the number of open tags/closed tags.

Anon

Thanks alot.

Sounds like a good idea.

Perhaps I could make it general enough to work with any tags so that it wouldn't have to be edited whenever new tags are added.

Thanks for getting me going, I just had a great idea of how to implement it.

Anon

I wonder if the XML parser might be adaptable to this task.

Anon

I haven't played with XML much before, perhaps I should look at that just for the sake of dabbling into XML

thanks

harlan

Anon

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Anon

Could someone send me an example code of how you would make sure sme closed an Open Bold tag? I'm really in the dark...