format functions

[clairence]

Today I learned about nl2br. What a wonderful tool.

What I am looking to do is have my users input data exactly as they'd like it to display on the screen. This will include carriage returns, tabs, multiple spacings, etc.

Are there other formatting tools (like nl2br) that work on these other things?

Is there some list of them?

Thanks.

[Drakla]

there aren't - you might want to be looking at a tool like htmlarea which is just one of many interfaces that lets users put 'rich content' into a standard text box.

There are a few threads about it on here, but you might be better off googling

[clairence]

Drakla, thanks for the reply... though it's not what I wanted to hear.

just to clarify (hoping there's another answer), my site users will enter their desired layout once, and I'll store it in mySQL. There is no further user input involved (which is what htmlarea seems to be about).

Without using one of the htmlarea products, would I be able to simply substitute HTML tags into the data as I process and save it?
Maybe that's the same question I asked originally.