Text Formatting Question

[ironside82]

I have a forum on my site for people to post messages. Is there a way to get the text to format correctly when the user posts it?

 

At the moment if a user types the following:

 

----

Hello everyone here is my shopping list:

 

-egg

-cheese

-milk

-bread

----

 

The results will look like: "Hello everyone here is my shopping list: -egg -cheese -milk -bread"

 

All on the same line!

 

How do I get it to recognize that there has been a new line created or any other html formatting for example and transfer it to the database so its displays correctly when it is recalled?

 

Thanks for your help

 

James

 

[Caesar]

That depends on a couple of things. How are you storing the input? Are ypur processing or cleaning the text in a function prior to throwing it into your db?

 

One quick solution is to do:

 

<?php

$newtext = str_replace("\n","<br>",$posted_text);

?>

[AndyB]

nl2br() on the output from the database

[neel_basu]

Dont Forget To Use addslashes() and stripslashes()

[ironside82]

That worked a treat, thanks guys. I'm guessing getting bold underline and italic tags in are a little trickier!

[ted_chou12]

the most important function you should include is htmlentities() this formats the characters to non special characters that dont get recognized by html, so your page is not effected with user's spamming html codes.

Ted