WYSIWYG for form textbox?

rwaller

I have forms where users input text into a textbox and it is saved to mySQL database for retrieval and later for printed output. The problem is, frequently used high bit characters, such as degree sign, smart quotes, etc.do not map the same in ASCII as in the browser environment. So users type in these characters and we receive something entirely different. (It'll look ok to them, but not to me on my Mac, nor will the chars be correct when output as text). Is there some way via php to coerce the textbox to conform to ASCII, pipe the keyboard input out as correctly translated ASCII text, or better yet to somehow make it be ASCII AND ALSO still display correctly in everyone's browser as if it had been typed that way? Help! (I'm not even going to get into the CR-NL-LF problem here).

Anon

What about htmlentities()? It will convert, say a norwegian \'ø\' to ø, wich will later on be interpreted by the browser, and a \'real\' oslash is drawn, regardless of the original ascii character. (Hopefully).

Anon

Uhm, it will convert to <ampersand>oslash;

rwaller

it's worse than i thought ... i tried to process the text in the textbox by setting it to title case $textIn = strtolower($textIn); 
$textIn = ucwords($textIn); and i discovered that php doesnt even recognize the CR/LF pairs at the end of the lines as non-word characters ...
and when i $pieces = explode ("\n", $textIn); and implode it again, i wind up with more returns than i had before. This is totally a mess. What am i doing wrong here? Nothing seems to work.