Stop html encoding on POST

RossC0

Hi,

I know there is probably a simple solution to this but not sure how to find it!

The problem - a posted variable containing HTML is being converted - so & becomes & in the post version. How do I stop this from happening ?

Here is an example:

<?php
// The original Data
$visibleData = "<table id='&amp;123'><tr><td>Hello</td></tr></table>";

// If Posted output the posted variable.
if (!empty($_POST)){
	print_r($_POST['visibleData']);
	echo('<br/><br/> ======== ORIGINAL =========== <br/><br/>');
}
// Output the original.
echo $visibleData;

// When I view source I can see that they are no longer the same...
?>
<form method="POST">
	<input type="submit" />
	<input type="hidden" value="<?php echo($visibleData);?>" name="visibleData" />
</form>

Is it an php.ini setting??

Kudose

[man]htmlspecialchars/man would convert & to & amp ;

RossC0

Well I seem to be facing a multitude of problems with this!

I want to parse the posted XHTML content to make it into an array - so using htmlspecialchars wouldn't work as it would convert the tags also!

I'm actually posting the form in real life via javascript and this seems to be causing more problems!

As I'm using innerHTML to grab the table and it appears that browsers do some processing and the innerHTML value is different than the actual innerHTML!

Joy of Joys!

Kudose

What about just using str_replace on the specific characters? Too many?

editJust saw that innerHTML is part of XML, so...I won't be much help. Sorry./edit

RossC0

Gonna have to scrap this approach

Javascript in both IE and Firefox remove the end slash from img tags - thus making them none XHTML compliant!

I suppose I can work around that - but found out it only converts & amp; to & in certain cases!

In onclick it does, but in a a href='' it doesn't.

Barmy!

Bloodwine

It is not the total solution to your problem, but if you are running PHP5 and have control of the server it is hosted on then you can use the Tidy (HTMLTidy) extension to clean up any user-input (e.g.: filling in missing tags, changing all tags to lowercase, fixing order of tags, adding ending slashes to certain tags, etc.).

I have't tried it yet myself, but plan to do some testing in the near future. It claims to be able to make any block of HTML XHTML/XML compliant.

RossC0

Thanks for the tip Bloodwine - funnily enough I was reading an article about tidy over the weekend..

The application is based on a php4 server - but I may push for using php5 on this project.