Check the length of typed chars in WYSIWYG

Question

Hello!

In my site if use textarea + WSYWWYG (Wyzz WYSIWYG).

I would like to minimise and maximise the chars what the user typed. (for ex. min 100 max 1000).

After i post the form, i check the lengt of the posted field. (strln($_POST['text'..) But the WSYWYG editors post the field in HTML formatted so if the user type:fg then the length will be 9 (<P>fg</P>9).

Could someone suggest me anything how can i check the real length of the typed string?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The easiest way, even if it won't give a perfect result, would be to remove the HTML tags from the input, before calling strlen.

This can be done using the strip_tags function :

This function tries to return a string with all HTML and PHP tags stripped from a given str .

So, a portion of code such as this one could help :

$html = $_POST['text'];
$stripped = strip_tags($html);
$length_noHtml = strlen($stripped);
if ($length_noHtml >= 100 && $length_noHtml <= 1000) {
    // OK
} else  {
    // Not OK
}

As a sidenote, if you are using some multi-byte encoding (I'm thinking about UTF-8) for your application, you might want to use the mb_strlen function, instead of strlen :

• strlen will count the number of bytes in your string
• while mb_strlen will count the number of characters.