getting special chars out of mysql db

[Anon]

Hi all,

I have several records that contain special HTML escape characters such as """, the HTML escape for a double quotation mark. Every time I fetch these special characters from the database, they get turned into the actual character, not the escape sequence. But I want the escape sequence.

How do I maintain the escape sequence in the HTML that gets outputted? Is mysql_query or mysql_fetch_array converting these? I checked the source in the database and in all the HTML files. The escape sequences exist in the database, but get converted along the way.

Thanks for your help,
Michael Liedtke

[Anon]

You mean, they're getting turned into the actual characters when the HTML is rendered? For some reason that doesn't surprise me. View the HTML source and see if they're still shown as escape sequences there.

To render escape sequences as escape sequences, you need to replace the & with &, so that the HTML rendering engine will read """ as "ampersand q u o t semicolon" instead of "quote escape".

using htmlspecialchars() on text you're about to display will do this for you.