hi everyone,

i wanted to follow-up that post i made last week. what i've done is combined a few code snippets i found on phpbuilder.com and sourceforge into two functions. (oops! sorry i don't have the authors' names on-hand, but i tell you what: they rule like Zuul.)

clean_textarea takes content submitted on a web form and prepares it for entry into a MySQL database. it tries to make the HTML safe and turns e-mail and web addresses into links. dirty_textarea prepares that same block of text for entry back into a web form.

i only have one problem to solve (that i'm aware of): i need to make the clean_textarea function smart enough so that if it comes across an e-mail or web address that already has <a> tags surrounding it it won't try to add them again. anyone proficient at regex? :-)

here are the functions. if you have any suggestions, do please comment!



function clean_textarea($textarea) {

    /*    allows only the tags listed in the approvedtags array
            1 means accept the tag only (<p>)
            2 means accept all qualifiers (<p align="center">) */
            
    $approvedtags = array(
        "br"=>1,
        "b"=>1,
        "i"=>1,
        "u"=>1,
        "small"=>1,
        "blockquote"=>1,
        "hr"=>1,
        "ol"=>1,
        "ul"=>1,
        "li"=>1,
        "img"=>2
    );

    $keys = array_keys($approvedtags);

    $textarea = stripslashes($textarea);
    $textarea = eregi_replace("<[[:space:]]*([^>]*)[[:space:]]*>","<\\1>",$textarea);

    $tmp = "";
    while (eregi("<([^> ]*)([^>]*)>",$textarea,$reg)) {
    
        $i = strpos($textarea,$reg[0]);
        $l = strlen($reg[0]);
        
        if ($reg[1][0] == "/") { $tag = strtolower(substr($reg[1],1)); }
        else { $tag = strtolower($reg[1]); }
        

        if (in_array($tag,$keys) && $a = $approvedtags[$tag] ) {
        
            if ($reg[1][0] == "/") { $tag = "</$tag>"; }
            elseif ($a == 1) { $tag = "<$tag>"; }
            else { $tag = "<$tag".$reg[2].">"; }
            
        }
        
        else { $tag = ""; }
        
        $tmp.= substr($textarea,0,$i) . $tag;
        $textarea = substr($textarea,$i+$l);
        
    } //while
    
    $textarea = $tmp . $textarea;

    //find e-mail and web addresses and give them <a> tags
    $textarea = eregi_replace("[^\"](http://[[:alnum:]#?/&=.,]*)", " <a href=\"\\1\">\\1</a>", $textarea);
    $textarea = eregi_replace("(^[a-z]*://[[:alnum:]#?/&=.,]*)", " <a href=\"\\1\">\\1</a>", $textarea);
    $textarea = eregi_replace("(([a-z0-9_]|\\-|\\.)+@([^[:space:]]*)([[:alnum:]-]))", "<a href=\"mailto:\\1\">\\1</a>", $textarea);

    //block php tags
    $textarea = ereg_replace("<\?","",$textarea);
    
    //make safe for entry into MySQL
    $textarea = addslashes($textarea);
    
    //convert new line into <br>
    $textarea = nl2br($textarea);

    return $textarea;
}


function dirty_textarea($textarea) {
    $textarea = stripslashes($textarea);
    $textarea = ereg_replace("<br>", "", $textarea);
    return $textarea;
}