Best way on encoding input

zzz

I have a form that is used to cut'n'paste paragpaphs of text in to a database. The text may have line breaks, paragraph breaks, all sorts of special characters, anything from single and double quotes to trademarks, degrees and such.

Currently I encode this text and decode it on output by using the following code:

// input into db
if($_POST["myText"]) {
	$dbText=urlencode($_POST["myText"]);
}
else {
	$dbText=$myText;
}


// output from db

echo urldecode($dbText);

Question, is there a better way of doing it?

Drakla

[man]mysql_escape_string[/man] on it before sending it to the database and [man]htmlspecialchars[/man] with ent_quotes if you're pumping it out to HTML.

thorpe

using urlencode is probably not the best idea, it is designed for encoding a url, funny enough.

you might want to look at htmlspecialchars in the manual

zzz

As far as I remember I started using urlencode() to have paragraph and line breaks converted, which I do not believe I'll be able to achieve with htmlspecialchars().

Also it is quite limited to the number of characters it can convert, which could probably be expanded by using htmlentities().

Now I saw suggestions to use bin2hex() but again, what about formatting?

thorpe

I started using urlencode() to have paragraph and line breaks converted

converted to what?

zzz

Oh, I was mainly concern with preserving formatting. What I was converting was line and paragraph breaks. Encoded it'll look like:

This+is+Line1.%3CP%3EThis+is+Line2.

Decoded like:

This is Line1.

This is Line2.

Now, not to say I am totally happy with this solution and that's why I initiated this discussion thread.

If i coud figure out how to copy and paste bulleted text as well, that'll be great. :evilgrin: