Okay, I'm starting to tie myself in knots with this: Part of my site carries feature articles held in a MySQL database. I've written an admin page that allows me to edit the articles in an HTML form before saving them to the database (using INSERT or UPDATE as appropriate).
On the site, I want users to be able to search using keywords in the articles. Now, all of this is basically working, but I'm not sure quite what to do about special characters. If I use htmlentities on the data when writing it to the database, then an ampersand will be stored as & and this will display fine. But then I guess I need to similarly treat search strings if users' queries are to match properly. Also, if I pull the article into the editing form, I guess I need to reverse the process with html_entity_decode() before displaying and editing it, which is getting a bit convoluted. Is there any reason why I shouldn't store characters in their natural form in the database - (eg, store '&' as '&' rather than '&') and then just use htmlentities to display the text? I'd be grateful for any opinions. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
