How can I Display code as text like in these forums?

What part of it do you want?

• The formatting is a fixed-width font. The most common web-safe monospaced font is 'Courier New.'
• If you want the numbering, break each line into list items and make the entire element a list.
• If you want the options above the code, you'll need to make them in JavaScript.

Thanks. What about having the code display as just readable text and not executing thats what im really after. Like the code bracket button. I'm using php, html, and java but it I can get it to display instead of execute

For example the below would show as text like it is instead of posting and trying to execute.


thanks any insight is greatly appreciated

thanks. i added a better example I want to find out how to post the code as plain text like the code button allows you to do.

this
should be
(though it may come from an editor’s auto-conversion)

find out how to post the code as plain text like the code button allows you to do

you may want to explore the CSS of these code windows. as far as I can tell it’s just a special styled list, but it is all plain text. you may want to explore the <pre> and <code> HTML elements. (in XML you’d use a CDATA section to prevent code execution)

you wouldnt happen to know how to edit with auto-conversion for say multiple languages at once such as the code button here does?

this’ forums editor has, afaik, no auto-conversion. it’s just a text field. and I’d discard any editor, which does auto-conversion I don’t want. the only thing [code] does is denoting a text, which is to be converted to the code list server side

PS. you can highlight PHP code with highlight_string() and highlight_file().

if you’re looking for a code editor, use something made for that purpose (Notepad++, Proton, SubEthaEdit, Bluefish, Geany to name only some)

The [code] tags here do NOTHING at all. They just display code in list format.

If you want something that highlights code, I'd highly suggest GeSHi, the "Generic Syntax Highlighter." I'd also suggest this addition to BYTES.com, but I'm sure they abandoned syntax highlighting for.. some reason. o.O

well if I insert that code now part of it displays but not all of it and then the code caused and error where I had to delete the post because it disabled the pages entire functionality.

Im thinking more of how to strip the code of anything that could cause problems with the database and php funcitonality and then placing it in a secure div for insertion and display, again your insight is much appreciated...

database input has to be validated in any case.

what part is making the trouble?

Do you need htmlentities/htmlspecialchars?

@kovik
No good reason that I could find. They said the old system we used was very buggy, yet I noticed nothing wrong with it. The issue has been brought up countless times but has always fallen on deaf ears.

thanks i think i should find my answer in htmlentities/htmlspecialchars really appreciate the help guys.

@Markus
Then it's abt time they started using GeSHi. ;)
The forums that I started out at use it, and they taught me everything that I know. Literally, everything. I didn't even know PHP, SQL, JavaScript, or CSS when I started going there. :P

@kovik
Well, there are many possible libraries to use. However there seems to be no interest from the owner (KUB) to test any of them. I have no idea how complicated it is to integrate plugins for vBulletin. I cannot understand why we're using vBulletin when there are free and better alternatives. Anyway, this conversation has headed off-topic.

Mark.

i used html specialchars and its working a little but not all the way im using mysql and php with java enabled. When i use html special chars and then decode to show the post its still causing errors when the code is used do you know of any good examples or ways around this?

what kind of errors?

PS. you know that htmlspecialchars() is charset dependent?

@leelotis
That happens when you are not doing encoding and decoding at right steps. Like you need to do some encoding before saving the text in database. This does not necessarily have to be specialchars, you can do it with mysql_real_escape_string, and then use specialchars when retrieving.
Also understand that specialchars and real escape are not complimentary to each other. Specialchars will help you to show the HTML content safely on the browser, while real_escape will make sure there's unsafe-to-database character present in the text.
You may need to do some extra encoding-decoding depending upon what type of text you are dealing with.

i did it and it works great. Thanks again.