I'm getting very confused over handling html coding and foreign language characters in form fields. I'm building a minor CMS component to my site where people will add chunks of text which may contain various European letters and other bits which can be nicely handled by "htmlspecialchars". It would be nice if they could also add a limited amount html coding: like bold, italics, and hyperlinks. htmlspecialchars of course destroys all that.
How do the experts deal with this? (This forum window, for example, inserts square tags around html mark-up, how does that work).
Also, if the person reopens the form to edit a record, does anything need to be stripped and readded upon submit?
Thanks for any guidance!
