I have a form in which I want to enter elements that will later be assembled into HTML documents. What I am entering, and what I need to end up with, often includes things such as é, —, and related elements. The editor went and converted those for me, exactly what I'm trying to avoid! What I typed as examples were the HTML codes for a non-breaking space (ampersand-n-b-s-p-semicolon), the letter e with an acute accent (ampersand-e-a-c-u-t-e-semicolon), and an em-dash (ampersand-m-d-a-s-h-semicolon).
I need to have those strings preserved. I want them saved in the database, which they are once, but when I resubmit the page with 20 or so fields on it, because I've made a change to some other field, then I end up with the code being rendered. But I don't want it rendered, I want it preserved so that the browser will render my final document correctly. After submitting it a second or third time, I invariably end up with garbage where my entities had been.
I've tried mysql_real_escape_string(), htmlentities(), htmlspecialcharacters(), even html_entity_decode(htmlentities()) and nothing works. I end up with various levels of nonsense.
I do not need the system to take an em-dash or an accented character and turn it into the entity, although that wouldn't hurt. I just want it to preserve the codes that I've put in.
How do I do this? (And why is it so much work?)
Van
Here's the form field:
<textarea name="qih_quote" cols="75" rows="5" wrap="soft"><?php echo $s['qih_quote'];?></textarea>
Here's the line in the submit script that reads that:
$qih_quote = $_POST['qih_quote'];
I've wrapped the $_POST variable in just about everything I can think of as mentioned above. All I want is for the exact string that I put in that textarea to be saved in the table, to be displayed in the textarea when I come back to it, and to be saved to the table again without any modifications at any time.
