Displaying information from a MySQL database

Beauford2

I really hope someone can help, as I really hate to have to port everything I have written to something that actually works.

All I want to do is display stuff from a MySQL database the same way it went in.

So a comma looks like a comma, an aposrophe looks like an apostrophe, carots look like carrots, etc. etc.

I have tried 100's of different ways of using HTMLSPECIALCHAR's, HTML ENTITIES, stripslashes, etc. and always the same problems. If an apostrophe displays, a left bracket doesn't, and so on.

It's been literally months trying to figure out how to get this to work.

As you can probably tell, I'm just a little ticked at this. If this can't be done, can someone point to a language and database option where it can be done. I'm tired of spending hours on end trying to get a character to display the way it should.

It's the most idiotic thing I think I have ever seen.

Thanks

bradgrafelman

You're going to have to give us some examples... obviously, PHP+MySQL works just fine for the rest of us (otherwise we wouldn't be using it), so it must be something in your code.

Beauford2

Exapmples aren't really needed. I just need to know how to get the text people put into a form to look the same coming out of the MySQL DB as it is going in.

So if somone enters B<B>!!Y, That's how I want it to look on the screen when I retrieve it from the database.

I also want them to be able to edit the info they entered, and have it look the same when they edit it. Which seems to be more of a challenge.

Of course keeping security in mind.

Thanks again.

bradgrafelman

Beauford2 wrote:
Exapmples aren't really needed.

They aren't? How are we supposed to tell what you're doing wrong?

Beauford1 wrote:
So if somone enters B<B>!!Y, That's how I want it to look on the screen when I retrieve it from the database.

It sounds like you're not wanting any symbols that would have special meaning in HTML to be parsed; in that case, just run the text through [man]htmlentities/man so that such entities are converted into their literal versions (e.g. '<' becomes '<').

Beauford2 wrote:
I also want them to be able to edit the info they entered, and have it look the same when they edit it. Which seems to be more of a challenge.

Well wait a minute; do you mean you want the formatting to be preserved, like an MS Word interface with bold/italic/underline buttons and all? If so, then you'd probably want some sort of client-side editor that can convert this styling into HTML, such as FCKeditor or TinyMCE.

Beauford2 wrote:
Of course keeping security in mind.

Of course. I'm not sure if the two WYSIWYG editors I mentioned above offer HTML filtering, but if not, you could take a look at something like [man]strip_tags/man to allow only those HTML elements in the whitelist to be stored in the DB, stripping out malicious <script> tags and whatnot.