[Zimwy]

Hi,
I've written a nice small message board for some friends in PHP and MySQL. I was wondering however how to make the message box behave more like the one on this forum. For instance, if you type a return, it sends through a [br], or if you type a quote, it sends it as a quote. At the moment, it won't even post if there's a quote in the message. I remember seeing something like to_HTTP_STRING() or something like that. Any advice?

Thanks!
gabe

[philzilla]

i'd suggest downloading phpBB and looking at the code. it's bound to be pretty much the same method as vB uses. i've learnt a few things that way.

[nutbits]

You definitely should do:

$text = addslashes($text);

before you try to insert the text into the database. This adds slashes before all quotes.
If you don't, SQL will choke on the quote charaters. Or worse, someone could attack your database with a cleverly devised message.

Before you display the message you just have to do:

$text = stripslashes($text);

after you get it from the database.

[forkies]

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but why not just use phpBB? It's free and fits into your PHP/MySQL combo requirements. It's powerful and did I mention free?

Unless you're just doing it for the fun of it... in which case, go nuts!

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by Zimwy:
Hi,
I've written a nice small message board for some friends in PHP and MySQL. I was wondering however how to make the message box behave more like the one on this forum. For instance, if you type a return, it sends through a [br], or if you type a quote, it sends it as a quote. At the moment, it won't even post if there's a quote in the message. I remember seeing something like to_HTTP_STRING() or something like that. Any advice?

Thanks!
gabe

$text = nl2br(htmlentities(stripslashes($text), ENT_QUOTES));