As you can tell from the title this is actually more of an HTML question. I have a perl cgi script for a knowledge base that allows folks to add technotes as html. Everything works fine, except html escapes in textareas. For example:

If a user is adding a technote that refers to xml edits, and they want to escape the < by using "&lt;" then the file gets posted and saved fine by my script. But when the user comes back to edit the document again, and I spit it out between the textarea tags - it stays that way in the html source, but in the textarea the &lt; gets traslated to < and when it is saved, the xml tags that were in the technote to be modifed as text are now interpreted as html/xml tags and not text to be displayed in the textarea.

Funny enough the <pre> <code> tags dont help - they aren't interprested as tags, but rather displayed.

Does anyone know a way around this? or are textareas just crappy for editing html? Maybe some type of javascript?

Here is some example code - I've escaped the < and > so that it will show ok in here:

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

Just drop this in an html doc, and you will see that the escapes will show as <> and not &lt; and &gt; in the textarea

I'll probobly get bashed since the answer has little to do with perl, but I figured if anyone might know, it'd be the Perl Monks

TIA, Jeff

In reply to HTML Problem getting entities into a textarea by muad33b

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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