HTML code input from form problems

[legacyblade]

Hello. My employer contracted me to make a web script that replaces certain items of text in an HTML document (the name, contact e-mail, etc). It's all very well and good, and functioning. Except for one error I didn't realize until the final testing.

 

One thing that my script is replacing is a bit of the HTML code for an e-mail optin form. The script passes no errors when HTML is given to it as a string, but it refuses to replace properly. After some experimenting, I found that the problem is this: anything after a < doesn't show up in a string. Anything else (even ',",\ or other special characters) show up just fine as a character in the string. But anything after the first instance of a < is not included in the string (and when the whole string is HTML code, that doesn't work very well). I've even tried passing \<, but that just makes the value of the string "\".

 

Does anyone know how to get around this problem?

[rondog]

I dont think you can escape that character, but rather replace it with <

[rondog]

and actually I just found this which might be helpful: http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php

[legacyblade]

Thanks! That gives me a great step in the right direction. Typing in < instead of < works. However, I'm not quite sure how to replace the <s from a textarea (they paste in the HTML) with a <

 

Any suggestions?

[legacyblade]

bump. I still have a problem. I'd try replacing every instance of < in the string with <, but that character ends the string. < and anything after it are considered not in the string. So I'm not quite sure how to go about fixing it.

 

I'm getting the input from a textarea that's being submitted via ah html form. Any suggestions?

[kenrbnsn]

Use htmlentities on the string when you display it.

 

Ken

[legacyblade]

Worked perfectly, thanks