Format question for news posts

[Paragon]

I have really been thinking how I want to handle news posts and how I want it to be displayed.

First let me explain a few things I am doing. I don't want to allow HTML. I have some BBCODE type style stuff and everything works fine.

I add slashs before its sent to the database and that works fine to provide valid queries and no gibberish or people trying to find holes in a input slot.

What I want to know is it best to format all HTML characters in the message then send it and save it to the database? Or do you think I should format the text when I pull it from the database. Now granted I would guess this would take more resources, but would it be noticable?

What I was thinking since I don't want to allow HTML at all I will just use a strip tags function then when I want to display the text I will use the htmlspecialchars function. This fucntion "htmlspecialchars" would only be used in [qoute] or

 tags.  Unless somebody else can think of another one that I would want to use as well.

Does this sound like a good idea?  How have you handled this?

[Weedpacket]

Is there the potential for the news article to be re-edited later? Or the site to present the same article in different ways (on the page, emailed, digested, etc.)? If so, then it would make sense to store the article bbcoded (so that you don't have to try and recover the "raw" version every time you want to change something), and either translate it on the fly into whatever format is needed at the time, and maybe cache it in the translated format somewhere as well.

[Paragon]

cache isn't a bad idea, but I wonder how server instensive it is to generate it on the fly and I also wonder how that would affect the database size.

[BuzzLY]

In my opinion, databases should be for data, nothing more. Of course there are exceptions, but I try to stick to this as a general rule.

Now, in your case, it would make sense to allow the text to be saved in the database as it was entered. So, if you use a bbcode for "code," it might look like this:

Take a look at the [code]foo[/code] command.

Instead of replacing your bbcode and putting it in the database, I suggest you store it as is, then format it as you are displaying it. That way, if you decide later to change how code is displayed, ALL [code] will be formatted in the new way.

The overhead when doing your conversions will most likely not be too great, so IMHO caching really wouldn't be necessary except for the most extreme cases.

[Paragon]

Thanks for the pointers.