Question

How could I convert everyting between a tag to html enities:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,
sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore
magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
<code class="highlight sql">
    CREATE TABLE `comments`
</code>

<h1>Next step</h1>

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,
sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et
dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum.
<b>Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus</b> est Lorem
dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur
sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua:
<code class="highlight php">
    <?php
        $host = "localhost";
    ?>
</code>

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr.

Note: That example above is a string which I could convert in PHP.

Answer 1

This comes down to a regex for me. And before you start shouting it is possible to reliably match & replace subsets of html, as long as there are no nesting tags.

This is the easy way tbh. A regex to match a tag start till end and apply a function to the matches / encoding what we need and replacing it.

Heres the code:

<?php
$string = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,
sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore
magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
<code class="highlight sql">
    CREATE TABLE `comments`&
</code>

<h1>Next step</h1>

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,
sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et
dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum.
<b>Stet clita kasd gubergren&, no sea takimata sanctus</b> est Lorem
dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur
sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy " eirmod " tempor invidunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliq&uyam erat, sed diam voluptua:
<code class="highlight php">
    <?php
       * $host = "localhost";
    ?>&
</code>

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr.';

echo preg_replace("/(<code[^>]*?>)(.*?)(<\/code>)/se", "
    stripslashes('$1').
    htmlentities(stripslashes('$2')).
    stripslashes('$3')
", $string);

And heres a working testcase on codepad

http://codepad.org/MhKwfOQl

This will work as long as there are no nasty nested tags / corrupted html.

I would still advise you to try and make sure you save the data as you want to make it visible, encoded where needed.

If you want to replace between a different set of tags change the regex.

Update: It seemed that $host was being parsed by php… and ofrourse we don’t want this. This happened because php evaluates the replacement string as php which then executes the given functions and inputs the found strings into those functions, and if that string is encapsulated by double qoutes it will parse those strings too… heh what a hassle.

And another problem then arises, php escapes single and double qoutes in matches so they won’t generate parse errors, this ment that any qoutes in the matches had to be stripped from their slashes too… resulting in the pretty long replace string.