"all the dots, quotes, semicolumns, etc" are usually taken care of by the quote() method within DBI (you are uysing DBI, right?). Though for keywords, you may just what to use what seems to be the Google approach and get rid of all punctuation in your indices and in terms entered for searches.

Why are you letting users enter HTML? If you're getting it from another source, that's different, though, you may be stuck with it.

Do the HTML parsing modules break for you when confronted with invalid HTML? Given the crap floating aroud the web, I'd be surprised, especially since all you want to do is get rid of the tags. Have you tested any of the modules?

My suggestion would be to cobble together some test data and throw it at some modules to see the results.

--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com

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