Hi
I have a serious problem with a load of data that is in my db.

In a lot of the Db fields there is HTML such as < and > together with &

I am extracting this data fine however, when it renders it is NOT valid HTML and is falling over on the w3c check with errors and warnings like below:

You tried to include the "<" character in your page: you should escape it as "&lt;"
You used an unescaped ampersand "&": this may be valid in some contexts, but it is recommended to use "&amp;", which is always safe.

So my question is how can i extract these characters and render in valid way so as to pass validation check?

Really hope someone can help with this as have been up half the night trying to sort with no progress.

Cheers
Steve

Either use the str_replace() function in php after retreiving the data, or change the data itself using MySQLs' REPLACE() function.

EDIT: And in the future, make this replacement before the data is stored in your database

No. You have to store the full text (with HTML) and only show it how you like it (using htmlentities OR not). The reason your code is not w3c compliant is because of the content, make it OK before storing it.

Originally Posted by vectorialpx

No. You have to store the full text (with HTML) and only show it how you like it (using htmlentities OR not). The reason your code is not w3c compliant is because of the content, make it OK before storing it.

NO!

As a general principle you do not modify data before storing just to suit a later use or presentation of the data.

To give a quick example, imagine the stored data was student's responses to marked exercises. Manipulating before storing woukld be very bad.

Originally Posted by PaulW

As a general principle you do not modify data before storing just to suit a later use or presentation of the data

That's what I said...

Originally Posted by vectorialpx

make it OK before storing it.

So er?

make it OK before storing it

This is not my entire post. Look upper, I bet you can read more than those last 6 words.