HTML formatting in TEXTAREA

da_marek

hello!
can anyone tell me where can i learn how to use formatting buttons in textarea like in this forum? i heard that it can be done with some kind of VB formating? what is VB? is it complicated or is it simple thing? i would like to have buttons BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE and URL... very simple...

Norman_Graham

VB is visual basic, the third generation of the programming language called BASIC.

Norman

da_marek

yeah.. i thought so... but i never worked with that... can you help me and tell me is it complicated to 'implement' or whatever that VB in php or html?
please tell me the method of creating those buttons on my php page!!!
please!!!

Blob

You would need javascript probably (I'm not too good with that sorry). It brings up a dialog box, you enter something, and the script adds BBCode around it (sds for bold dfdf italics, etc). I'm sure if you google for the dialog box thing you'll find out.

For the actual bolding when you display what the person wrote, you'd use string replace, and change with <b> with </b> etc.

Norman_Graham

Originally posted by da_marek
can you help me and tell me is it complicated to 'implement' or whatever that VB in php or html?

To the best of rudimentary knowledge, there's no native support for VB in PHP. There is, however, some sort of C++ deal with PHP and MySQL, about which I know nothing. The rumour is that PHP5 will be .NET compatible, which could open up whole worlds of enhancement possibilities with VB.NET, C# etc, but all this is way over my head.

If you want buttons right now, try Javascript as Blob suggests. This forum interface seems to use basic HTML buttons with javascript functionality. Have a look at the source code to see what's going on.

Norman

ereptur

The VB that you have heard of is probably vbcode, which is used in the vbulletin forum software that this site uses.

It has nothing to do with visual basic.
It is actually a set of custom tags for use with formatting in forums.

Allowing html in posts is not always a good idea, so php has a function called htmlentities() that takes any input the user gives it and converts any html tags or reserved characters and translates them into their respective html entities, such as <a> becomes <a>.

To still allow users to post formatted messages, you then have to come up with an alternative tag system. For example,
some text[/b/] on this forum makes "some text" appear bolded (if you remove the "/" character in the closing tag).

The way this works is that when the information is read from the database and it encounters one of these tags, it replaces the tag with the real html tag so the text appears formatted in the users web browser.

Did this explain it thoroughly enough?

da_marek

thanks to ereptur and everybody who replied me!
now... i managed to do what i wanted with eregi_replace function but now im trying to do those silly buttons which are made in javascript... i have problems with that right now but i wont search for help here because this is php forum, not javascript forum..

thanks again!