httpservice result format

Question

I use flex and php to retrieve information from my sql database. What i have been doing is formatting the result from the database query into xml and then putting the result into an arraycollection. It all works fine except one of my database fields contains a lot of text that website users enter and as xml doesn't like tags like <> so I leave it un formatted but I would like to format it. Would I be better using flashvars or text than xml? Or is there another way?

Answer 1

You should have your database code that produces the XML escape special XML characters (e.g. <, > and &) with the standard entities (&lt;, &gt; and &amp;) and stick with XML.

Answer 2

Or wrap text within CDATA.

Answer 3

I have tried using $description=str_ireplace("<","&lt",$description); $description=str_ireplace(">","&gt",$description); but when I view it in my application I see the text with all the tags ie the tags are not parsed. What am I doing wrong?