Converting Special Characters To Html

[1internet]

I have site content with special characters that came form Word. However I don't want to convert all the content to htmlentities(), because I need some elements like h1, p, a, img. How can I convert all these special characters but leave the elements when they are all contained in the same string?

[MDCode]

htmlspecialchars and htmlentities will both convert the less than and greater than. You will need to str_replace all of the tags back into your data

[1internet]

oh ok so I will just need to replace < > with <> ?

[MDCode]

No, then you are risking javascript being used. You need to replace specific tags only. Example:

 

<?php

// $_POST['sometext'] will be <h1>Title</h1><p>Some paragraph</p><script>alert(hi)</script>

$original_text = htmlentities($_POST['sometext']);

// The htmlentitied tags (< being <  and > being >)
$converted = array('<p>', '</p>', '<h1>', '</h1>');

// What to replace them with
$tags = array('<p>', '</p>', '<h1>', '</h1>');

// Use str_replace to make things so much simpler
$new_stuff = str_replace($converted, $tags, $original_text);

echo $new_stuff;
?>

 

$new_stuff will display Title as an h1 header and the paragraph but will convert the script tags so they won't work

Edited December 4, 2012 by SocialCloud

[Christian F.]

Personally I prefer the following method for defining a relationship between search and replacement terms:

$replacements = array (
   '<p>' => '<p>',
   '</p>' => '</p>',
   '<h1>' => '<h1>',
   '</h1>' => '</h1>',
);

Then use array_keys () and array_values () in the str_replace () call. Makes it a lot easier to see the exact relations, and much harder to mess them up by forgetting to edit one of the arrays (or editing in the wrong place).

Edited December 4, 2012 by Christian F.

[MDCode]

Personally I prefer the following method for defining a relationship between search and replacement terms:

$replacements = array (
'<p>' => '<p>',
'</p>' => '</p>',
'<h1>' => '<h1>',
'</h1>' => '</h1>',
);

Then use array_keys () and array_values () in the str_replace () call. Makes it a lot easier to see the exact relations, and much harder to mess them up by forgetting to edit one of the arrays (or editing in the wrong place).

 

I only like to provide basic code (unless payed). But this seems like a much neater method.