Question

In a PHP application I am writing, I would like to have users enter in text a mix of HTML and text with pointed-brackets, but when I display this text, I want to let the HTML tags be rendered by the non-HTML tags be shown literary, e.g. a user should be able to enter:

<b> 5 > 3 = true</b> 

when displayed, the user should see:

5 > 3 = true

What is the best way to parse this, i.e. find all the non-HTML brackets, convert them to > and <?

Answer 1

I’d recommend having the users enter BBcode style markup which you then replace with the html tags:

[b]This is bold[/b] [i]this is italic with a > 'greater than' sign there[/i] 

This gives you more control over how you parse user’s input into html, though I admit it looks like an unnecessary burden.