Php, database fourm

[stu]

Hi,

I thought about something last night and i have been trying to find away around it all day and so far i have come up with nothing, Now its starting to bug me as i no it can be done just dont know how.

Say for example i was to build a fourm, this would be a database driven forum. very similar to this one. A user asks a question regarding to coding, they put a snipit of code say 

<table with="100" border="1">
<tr>
<td>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

the message would be inserted into the database field which would be a text area. users who view the message would go to the page and the message would be called from the database.

my question is, when the message is called from the database how do i go about getting the code to display as the code example rather than the browser interpritating it and displaying a table when it is called back from the database?

thanks in advanced

[Andy]

Howdy Stu 

What you need to do is to use the PHP functions to encode and decode HTML before and after saving and retrieving the post from your database.

Actually, this is a difficult task IMO and you are maybe better off reverse-engineering how others have done it before. For example by studying existing scripts such as MYBB that handle this OK.

For a start on the PHP, check out: http://www.php.net/htmlentities

All the best, Andy