display VARCHAR(mysql) and special chars in html

[deelan]

Jonas Meurer wrote:
(...)
> i've changed my plans, and now will transform the comments to html
> before saving them in mysql. this way, the comment never contains
> special chars except they weren't filtered out when safed in mysql.
> 
> do any filters exist, to transform plain text to html? otherwise i might
> use third-party products, as text2html.
> 
> what do you think?

as you may known mysql 4.1 offers utf-8 support. il would be
wise to keep everything as utf-8: db, html generation and finally
serve, with correct HTTP headers, pages encoded as utf-8.

to do this you might have to fiddle with mysql settings and make
sure that issuing a:

show varibles;

almost all of these settings:

character_set_client            latin1 
               character_set_connection        latin1 

character_set_database          latin1 

character_set_results           latin1 
               character_set_server            latin1 
                              character_set_system            utf8 


use utf-8 (as you can see my copy of mysql does not), otherwise i
think bad things  will occur.

if you prefer to filter out weird characters and
encode as html &#xxxx entities textile[1] does the job
just fine, you can specify input and output encoding.

cheers,
deelan.

[1] http://dealmeida.net/en/Projects/PyTextile/

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