Help - stripping special characters from email and retaining html tags

[Big Moxy]

I want to send html formatted text yet strip out special characters
(e.g. quotes and semi colons). I've seen preg_replace examples like
$messageout = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z\[\]\(\)<>]/i','',$message); to
preserve some additional characters but don't know how to approach
preserving html in general.

This is a typical message line: $message.= "<b>Date: </b>" . $today .
"<br />";

I am setting these headers:

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers.= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers.= "From: $emailaddress\r\n";

Also, where can I find out which characters need to be escaped?

Please advise.

Thank you!
- Tim

[Justin Koivisto]

Big Moxy wrote:

I want to send html formatted text yet strip out special characters
(e.g. quotes and semi colons). I've seen preg_replace examples like
$messageout = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z\[\]\(\)<>]/i','',$message); to
preserve some additional characters but don't know how to approach
preserving html in general.

This is a typical message line: $message.= "<b>Date: </b>" . $today .
"<br />";

I am setting these headers:

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers.= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers.= "From: $emailaddress\r\n";

Also, where can I find out which characters need to be escaped?

not sure i am getting what you are asking here, but htmlspecialchars()
perhaps? http://php.net/htmlspecialchars

--
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[Big Moxy]

On Oct 8, 1:10 pm, Justin Koivisto <[e-mail]:

Big Moxy wrote:

I want to send html formatted text yet strip out special characters
(e.g. quotes and semi colons). I've seen preg_replace examples like
$messageout = preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z\[\]\(\)<>]/i','',$message); to
preserve some additional characters but don't know how to approach
preserving html in general.

This is a typical message line: $message.= "<b>Date: </b>" . $today .
"<br />";

I am setting these headers:

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers.= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers.= "From: $emailaddress\r\n";

Also, where can I find out which characters need to be escaped?

not sure i am getting what you are asking here, but htmlspecialchars()
perhaps?http://php.net/htmlspecialchars

--
Posted via a free Usenet account fromhttp://www.teranews.com- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I'm sorry I didn't state my objective for the post. Thank you for
telling me about htmlspecialchars. I believe it is applicable in this
case but not sure. My goal is to add defensive coding for whatever the
user may intentionally or unintentionally type in and still preserve
the html formatted email that has been created. Should I converse my
initially formatted message with htmlspecialchars and then apply
preg_replace to it? If so, which of these special characters require a
preceding "escape" character -@ , . & ; -

Thanks!