$content = htmlentities($content, ENT_QUOTES) and a strange situation

[kigoobe]

Well, data is getting stored in my database as -

<p>Hi there<br />How's life<br />éèçî characters</p>

Now if I do htmlentities, everything is getting coded, both special charactes like à and stuffs like < and >. Anyone has an idea about how to get rid of this issue?

Ideally I would like the special characters to be coded, but not the <s and >s so that my html remain as they are.

Thanks.

[cranial-bore]

If it's just the HTML you want to preserve you'll probably need to convert the < > back from the character entities.

$text = str_replace(array('&lt;', '&gt;'), array('<', '>'), $text); 

By the way I would recommend doing this, and htmlentities when displaying your data, not when inserting it.

[kyberfabrikken]

For a proper solution, you'd have to parse the html. You could probably just use a regular expression, with a callback though:

<?php
$html = "<p>Hi there<br />How's life<br />éèçî characters</p>";
function callback_replace_htmlentities($matches) {
  return $matches[1].htmlentities($matches[2]);
}
echo preg_replace_callback('~(<[^>]+>)([^<]+)~', 'callback_replace_htmlentities', $html);

Oh, and I agree with cranial-bore; You shouldn't save data as HTML.

[kigoobe]

Hi, thanks Cranial. Yeah the solution was so obvious still I could not figure it out. He he !!!

Thanks a lot man. I am laughing at myself.

[kigoobe]

Hi kyberfabrikken, can you please tell me what's the advantage of this preg replace solution over the previous one. I am just curious to know.

[kyberfabrikken]

Hi kyberfabrikken, can you please tell me what's the advantage of this preg replace solution over the previous one. I am just curious to know.

None really. I started typing it before cranial-bore hit submit, so I didn't see he already posted a reply.

[kigoobe]

ah, ok ... thanks for clarification.