Auto-close HTML tags using PHP

[andrewb]

Hi everyone,

Is anyone aware of a function or other bit of code that could quickly and easily close open HTML tags.

We're looking at this for a forum-type situation where members are permitted to use HTML in their messages, however sometimes forget to close the tags and muck up the rest of the page layout. e.g. <b>Hi, I forgot to close the bold tag...doh!

Any ideas greatly appreciated, I've had a hunt around but haven't found anything yet - still searching.

[penagate]

That's one of the reasons why BB code was invented.

If you are bent on allowing HTML, one thing you could do is parse the message into a DOM tree (using the DOMDocument class) and see if it is well-formed; if it isn't then you can show the user a message and not submit the post.

However, you really shouldn't let users post raw HTML anyway.

[andrewb]

Yeah I know, it's not my forum or code - was just trying to find a solution to a problem they're having. But I think the route will be BB code as you mentioned...

[visualAd]

Use PHP 5 and use the loadHTML() method of the DOMDocument object. This auto parses badly formed HTML and a subsequent call to saveXML() will output the valid HTML. The DOM functions can be found here:

http://www.php.net/dom