Question

Our users want to be able to type in

&lt;p&gt;some text goes here.</p> 

which gets saved to the database and then outputs to the screen as it should, i.e. however the browser renders <p> tags without actually displaying the <p> tags.

At the same time without affecting the existing database generated pages where the user has been typing in

<p>some text goes here.</p> 

Is this possible?

An example of “the customer is always right”. Do I have a choice? No, it’s something they want for some reason which is beyond me.

Answer 1

I’m unsure what you’re trying to accomplish. If you WANT the browser to render the tags when you display them, then use can use html_entity_decode:

echo html_entity_decode( "&lt;p&gt;some text goes here.</p> ");
echo html_entity_decode( "<p>some text goes here.</p> ");

If not, then you can pass the strings to htmlspecialchars

echo htmlspecialchars( "&lt;p&gt;some text goes here.</p> ");
echo htmlspecialchars( "<p>some text goes here.</p> ");