Question

I am trying to save HTML content with the Symfony2 form system but I am facing issues with escaping.

My addPost action looks like this

$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getEntityManager();

$post = new Post();
$postForm = $this->createForm(new PostFormType(), $post);

if ($request->getMethod() == 'POST') {
   $postForm->bindRequest($request);

   if($postForm->isValid()){
      $em->persist($post);
      $em->flush();
   }
}

The problem is that the post form has a content textarea that allows the user to enter html. When the form is submitted with html like <a href="#">test</a> the content gets saved to the database as <a href=\"#\">test</a>. And then on each subsequent save the backslashes escape themselves again and again…

What is the proper way to store HTML with the Symfony2 form component?

Answer 1

You should remove the backslashes from the string before sending it to the user to edit. You should be able to get the content from the $post object and then strip its slashes and set it back to the post content like so.

$post = new Post();
$post->setContent(stripslashes($post->getContent()));
$postForm = $this->createForm(new PostFormType(), $post);

Now when the form renders it will not have the escape characters.

However, I have found that if you return a response to the same page you will still see the backslashes. To avoid this you can return a RedirectResponse like this

if($postForm->isValid()){
   $em->flush();
   return new RedirectResponse('route', array('postId' => $postId)));
}