I recently talked about adding code to blogs and comments to Wordpress and making sure that certain characters are encoded properly. So to simplify things I thought I would create a little set of regular expressions that takes a sample of code and convert it into a Wordress friendly format. It consists of the following function, which takes the value of a text area called tochange and runs some regular expression replace functions on it. I have kept the expressions as simple as possible so they are quite easy to understand. The g argument for each expression means that the replace will be done for all of the text.
<script type="text/javascript">
function changeIt(){
var text = document.getElementById('tochange').value;
text = text.replace(/&/g,'&');
text = text.replace(/"/g,'"');
text = text.replace(/'/g,''');
text = text.replace(/</g,'<');
text = text.replace(/>/g,'>');
text = text.replace(/^\s+/mg,' ');
document.getElementById('changed').value = text;
document.getElementById('preTag').innerHTML = text;
}
</script>The only one which might cause an issue is the last one with the expression "^\s+". This simply matches for 1 or more white space characters at the beginning of a line. The m argument means that the ^ symbol will be used to mean the start of a line. You can test this function with the following HTML tags.
<textarea id="tochange" cols="50" rows="10"></textarea>
<input type="submit" onclick="changeIt()" />
<textarea id="changed" cols="50" rows="10"></textarea>
<pre id="preTag"></pre>The first textarea is what you want to alter, the second is the altered text and the pre tag displays what the altered text will look like in your browser.