mysql real escape string and retrieving data

cnperry

Quick question:

Upon entry into the database, I first clean form input data with html special characters, strip tags, and mysql real escape string. When I retrieve this data from the db, single quotes aren't coming out right on the pages. Some browsers display a question mark, others a blank space, and another (FireFox) totally screws up the text formatting.

There's got to be a quick 'n easy way to fix this problem. Any help is greatly appreciated...

Thanks,
Cameron

MikeSnead

Could you post some of the code that is being problematic, and perhaps a link to a page showing what is getting screwy on the display side of things.

cnperry

... and now I feel like an idiot; Murphy's law has come into play. It's working fine now, though I wonder if it has something to do with the editors copying and pasting directly from MS Word into the HTML form (which is a slightly different problem now). I know I went back and edited the plain text and I thought I had a problem last I looked, but maybe I was just seeing a cached version of the page.

Since I don't have any control over the content editors, is there a simple way to filter some of the junk Word uses and turn it into something the browser will understand. Is the easiest way to use a string replace function?

Thanks!

MikeSnead

Depends on what kind of extra stuff is being put into the form. If what's being place is a constant chunk of characters, then yes a str_replace() function call could do the trick, but if it's placing more complicated HTML-like markup into the data, then you'll probably need to look into doing a replace by regular expression via the ereg_XXX or preg_XXX line of functions.

Do you have an example of the kind of extra stuff that is being sent to the processing script that needs to be scrubbed out?

cnperry

So far it's been "text." They copy a paragraph and paste it into an HTML form. The problems aren't that big a deal - typically quotation marks, both double and single, left and right. No doubt there will be other characters that Word converts, from simple alphanumerics to symbols, etc. that will have to be dealt with. For example ordinals, tabs, dashes, elipses, etc.