not parseing html

[dcallan]

Hi everyone, just new to these boards, but I added phpbuilder to the firefox quick search so hopefully i will be around a bit.

What i'm wondering about is how to display text which may contain html but without having the parse and doing what the html does.

For instance at the moment i building an app and have just finished setting up a page to store articles in mysql, however there is first a <h6> tag which when I read it back makes text go small until <h1> is encounted which makes the whole page go into header style.

I want to just display things as plain text and not html. I hope you know what I mean, thanks for your help.

[cahva]

Checkout function htmlspecialchars

[dcallan]

hey thanks for that, I went with htmlentities in the end. Do you know if i can use htmlentities to replace addslashes for preparing text to be put into a database.

Also one more question, how do I preserve line breaks in the text as I put them in.

Thanks again.

[cahva]

The linebreaks are reserved but you dont see them if outputting to html. You have to convert newlines("\n") to <br>-tags. Theres a function in PHP to do just that:
nl2br()

Also if you are just printing straight html-code. Use for example:

echo '<pre>'.$string.'</pre>';