[thelist] displaying character entities in textareas

[Christopher Styles]

Not sure if you have seen this or not, but it is what I use in all of my 
CMS's. I think it may be your sweetest dream come true:

http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/

And it is -so- easy to configure, to take out functionality that you 
don't want, to add in new - and the forums are pretty trafficked as well....

chris( )

Pete Prodoehl wrote:

> Kae Verens wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> I don't have a solution to your problem, but a suggestion... Instead of 
> using a text filter to change *foo* into <strong>foo</strong> have you 
> considered using Textile, the 'humane web text generator'?
> 
>   <http://textism.com/tools/textile/>
> 
> There are versions written in PHP, Perl, Python, and even ASP... I found 
> it very easy to use the Perl version written by Brad Choate into a 
> simple CMS I wrote...
> 
> Back to the problem - my guess is the textarea of a browser displays 
> text (hence the name) not HTML, so I don't know if you'll get what you 
> want to work...
> 
> Pete
> 
> 
>