Preserving the Character set inside text area

[rite2vinoth]

HI

I want to display the contents of a big XML inside a text area so that the user would be able to edit it. But the XML consists of characters such as & " which are interpreted by as & and " respectively.
But if this going to be the case the backend systems could not read them. I used <xmp>, but it is already deprecated and further it would not work inside text area. Could somebody help me with this.

in short : &amp; should be displayed as &amp; itself and not & inside the textarea.

Vinoth

[KevinADC]

javascript I am sure can do the proper character escaping, but I don't know how to do it myself. You can also do it server side with PHP or perl or other scripting language. Bascially the & symbol needs to converted to &amp; so &amp; would become &amp;amp; etc etc etc.

[AricC]

HI

I want to display the contents of a big XML inside a text area so that the user would be able to edit it. But the XML consists of characters such as &amp; &quot; which are interpreted by as & and " respectively.
But if this going to be the case the backend systems could not read them. I used <xmp>, but it is already deprecated and further it would not work inside text area. Could somebody help me with this.

in short : &amp; should be displayed as &amp; itself and not & inside the textarea.

Vinoth

Maybe this is more of an XML question?

[rite2vinoth]

javascript I am sure can do the proper character escaping, but I don't know how to do it myself. You can also do it server side with PHP or perl or other scripting language. Bascially the & symbol needs to converted to &amp; so &amp; would become &amp;amp; etc etc etc.

Yeah.Basically the round about would be to do a replace all of &amp; with &amp;amp; and so on which we eventually did in the server side. But I wanted to know if anything could be done in the client side itself.

Thanks a lot anyways.

[rite2vinoth]

Maybe this is more of an XML question?

Not necessarily. The question is about the browser marking up the character sets and predominanty HTML stuff and javascript.

thanks

[KevinADC]

Yeah.Basically the round about would be to do a replace all of &amp; with &amp;amp; and so on which we eventually did in the server side. But I wanted to know if anything could be done in the client side itself.

Thanks a lot anyways.

I am pretty sure javascript can do the escaping, but I don't know how to do that or if in fact it can be done. Ask in the javascripting forum. As far as the browser itself goes, there is no mechanism I know of to do what you want.

[rite2vinoth]

I am pretty sure javascript can do the escaping, but I don't know how to do that or if in fact it can be done. Ask in the javascripting forum. As far as the browser itself goes, there is no mechanism I know of to do what you want.

Thanks Kevin for that. :-)

[srinivasang87]

I am pretty sure javascript can do the escaping, but I don't know how to do that or if in fact it can be done. Ask in the javascripting forum. As far as the browser itself goes, there is no mechanism I know of to do what you want.

I thought on the same lines. But javascript doesnt do anything special here!
These are the things I tried..

1. s=escape('&amp; ');
document.writel n("escaped string : "+s);

t=unescape('&am p;');
document.writel n("unescaped string : "+t);

Both returned '&'

2. <xmp>&amp;</xmp> OR <pre>&amp;</pre>
Both were displayed AS IS (ALONG WITH TAGS) inside the text area. But <xmp> did work OUTSIDE the textarea. But not a great idea as its already deprecated!

3. <plaintext> -- NEVER use this! It will BREAK all the HTML code after the <PLAINTEXT> tag..... All the remaining HTML will be displayed AS IS to the user..

[KevinADC]

OK, but who said anything about using the <plaintext> tag?

[drhowarddrfine]

<plaintext>? Are we making up elements as we go along?

You should carry on this javascript discussion on the javascript board.