displaying text like a forum

[mistafeesh]

I want to be able to store documents in a database and display them nicely.
At the moment, I have to put html tags into the documents to display them, but what I'd really like is tobe able to automatically format the text like a forum does, preserving carriage returns, etc. and able to put vbCode type tags in for bold, etc.

I fiddled with htmlentities, but that doesn't seem to allow for if I want bold or italic text etc.

how easy/possible to do is this?

[sid]

for carriage returns, simply store the text w/o html tags and output it using nl2br() ("new line to <BR>") - www.php.net/nl2br

for vBcode: preg_replace() - www.php.net/preg_replace - will be your friend - and examine existing systems to get some ideas...

rock the house
sid

[mistafeesh]

ta very much. will fiddle with those two doodahs.