in reply to HTML Problem getting entities into a textarea

I believe you'll have to 'double escape' the html escape code for it to show up correctly in the browser's textarea. For example if you wanted '>' to show in the textarea you'd have to write it as '>'. That way when the browser interprets the code it will only replace the '&' with '&' leaving '>' and not '>'.

Incidentally, in order to print this out correctly I have to triple escape the code. Talk about confusing!

-caedes

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Re: Re: HTML Problem getting entities into a textarea
by muad33b (Acolyte) on Apr 18, 2003 at 21:00 UTC

    Thanks, but if you try it like I suggested, you'll see the dilema - here is the problem:

    I want &lt; to show up as-is, since that is what the user typed when the document was created. If I have them double-escape (or really escape the & with &amp;) then when I save the text, and then display it later (on a technote display page that drops the html in a table cell) it will show as &lt; and not as <

    The problem is that most tags inside the textarea tag are NOT interpreted, but the following IS:

    <textarea>&lt;property key="smtpHost"        value=""/&gt;</textarea>

    Basically, I think that this is a bug in the textarea tag for html - any other ideas?

    TIA again, Jeff

[reply]
[d/l]
      I want &lt; to show up as-is, since that is what the user typed when the document was created.

      If the user literaly typed '&' 'l' 't' ';', then to prevent this from being corrupted when you spit the text back out into a textarea, you're going to need to escape the '&'. This isn't an HTML bug, though it's not the most documented aspect of HTML that you'll find.

[reply]

        Know what? This problem doesn't seem to exist here in perl monks. It's the same basic idea as here. Folks are entering html in textareas. But if I put this in

        <property key="smtpHost" value=""/>

        it is saved as I typed it - with the escapes, and viewed as I want it - escapes interpreted, and is brought back up in the edit textarea with the escapes intact; uninterpreted.

        What am I missing here? I need so save with all &s escaped to &amp;, and then unescape them to & when I display, but dump it when I edit, or vice versa?

[reply]

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