HTML and a textarea

BluntedbyNature

ok this is what i want to do. make a textarea in a form, that sends to a database. in that textarea i am going to write HTML tutorials, and in those tutorials i need to accually write HTML code, but when i write the HTML code the browers wont realize it as text, it makes it the accual code. sooo... i made the < to < and the > to > but now i need to make a bb code type thing so i can still use bold and make links and stuff like that... do you catch on to what i am trying to do?

Gary_King

Your paragraph is a little confusing, but I pretty much catch what you want to do. So, what's your question..?

epp_b

This should actually be easier than you may think. Just use something like:

eregi_replace("[", "<", $postedData);
eregi_replace("]", ">", $postedData);

...and all special "vb-like" tags (eg [ b ]) will be replaced to < b > so that they are interpreted as HTML.

Of course, you'll need more extensive code in order to use special tags, such as [ code ]

You could use something like:

eregi_replace("[code]", "<hr><pre>", $postedData);
eregi_replace("[/code]", "</pre></hr>", $postedData);

Oh, yes...very important: notice the backslashes before the "[" and "]" characters in the eregi_replace functions. This is done because these characters have a special regex meaning (which is far to much to get into here)

mcgruff

Take a look at htmlspecialchars() or htmlspecialentities().

If you instead want to do some custom replacing and want fastest code execution, I think str_replace() is the first choice, preg_replace() the second (if you need the power of pattern matching) and eregi never at all.