pre-loading HTML into a form

[guest]

Background: I'm writing my own quick & dirty content management system.

I've got to the stage where I'm trying to get my edit aricle page working. The article is successfully stored in a MySQL database. To edit the article, I'm pre loading it into the form.

I want to be able to include all HTML tags in the article body - but consider this...

My article contains

<p class="body"> Test text</p>

the php gets the aarticle from the database so the output ends up being something like...

<input ... value="<p class="body"> Test text</p>">

Obviously this is messed up and results in a wierd looking form.

Surely other people have come up with a solution to this..... How's it done?

[vaska]

you aren't using a textarea? or...maybe i can't understand what you are talking about...

but...this is how i would do it...

<textarea name="content" wrap="VIRTUAL" style="width:100%;height:300px;" class="editbox"><? echo $row['content']; ?></textarea>

good luck...vaska

[drawmack]

I've written one and used the textarea solution the only thing to be wary of is embedded forms will screw it up especially if those forms have a textarea in them.

[Weedpacket]

So you use [man]htmlspecialchars[/man].

[guest]

Yep - thanks for your help people. I've now used a combination of htmlspecialchars and stripslashes, to put the stuff into the input (textareas also suffer the same kind of problems) and then html_entity_decode to put it back into the database once I'm done.