[thelist] displaying character entities in textareas

[Kae Verens]

I am writing a gui for some text formatting codes that I use in my CMS, 
and am having a bit of trouble doing what I want to do.

As an example, I presently enable bold type similar to here:
"this is *bold* text" - my text filter then strips out those asterices 
and replaces them with <strong> and </strong>

I want to stop using the asterix character for this purpose, though, and 
the others I use ('/' for italics, '_' for underline, etc), and replace 
them with other more unlikely-to-be-mistakenly-used characters.

For example, underline might use the &micro; sign, which looks like a 
'u', but is unlikely to crop up in a paragraph.

The trouble is - I'm trying to insert these characters into textareas on 
teh click of a button - how can I enter character entities into a 
textarea? When I try with teh HTML of it, it simply shows up as 'This 
text is &micro;underlined&micro;", which is just daned ugly - I want the 
actual character to be placed instead.

Ideas?

Kae