send HTML Code in Textarea to PHP via Form

Question

Hi, i want to have a textarea where I can edit html code directly. After submitting the form the content if the textarea (with html tags) should be saved to a MySQL database. I use PHP to receive the date and save it to the database. My problem is, that the HTML code is not properly sent to PHP. I do not receive the HTML code but just the text. How could I fix this?

my Form looks like this:

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="form.php">
   <textarea name="html_code">
      <a href="link">testlink</a>
   </textarea>
   <input type=submit value="submit"/>
</form>

The form.php should now be able to show the content of the textarea

echo $_POST['html_code'];

shows: testlink

I want: <a href="link">testlink</a>

Answer 1

Are you echoing it into an HTML page? Because the code will be parsed into an actual link.

View the source of your output page.

Answer 2

You're using the wrong encoding type.

Instead of "multipart/form-data", it should be "text/plain".

You don't have to encode the data as Doug says above; but it will be encoded for you when you submit the form, so don't forget to decode before using.

Answer 3

Your form should be:

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="form.php">
   <textarea name="html_code">
      &lt;a href=&quot;link&quot;&gt;testlink&lt;/a&gt;
   </textarea>
   <input type=submit value="submit"/>
</form>

(No, it's not messed up. They're called HTML entities)

You can use htmlentities() in PHP to achieve that.

Answer 4

Thank you all for your answers. I found the problem. It was Joomla. Joomla removed HTML tags when I got strings via getVar. I had to use the mask option JREQUEST_ALLOWRAW to solve the issue.

JRequest::getVar('html_code', '', 'post' , 'STRING', JREQUEST_ALLOWRAW);