[thelist] displaying character entities in textareas
Pete Prodoehl
pete.prodoehl at cygnusinteractive.com
Tue Nov 11 10:20:26 CST 2003
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 µ 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 µunderlinedµ", 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
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