Showing line spacing in an RSS feed using nl2br

I have posted the code here, it seems to be working better, but I had gone into the database and taken out the weird characters there, like the person entered an asterisk, but in the BD table, it was a weird group of characters (Not the ascii code).
I also use htmlentities() when uploading the form to the DB.

echo	'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="rss.css" ?>';
 
echo '<channel>
    <title>Community Bulletin Board - CCTV</title>
    <link>http://concordtv.org/site/cbbrss/index.php</link>
    <pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
    <description>Community Bulletin Board (CBB) for ConcordTV (CCTV Inc)</description>';
 
function mysqldate_to_unix_timestamp($date) {
 
    list($year, $month, $day) = explode('-', $date);
    return mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year);
}
// connection stuff was here//
 
$db_connection = mysql_connect ($db_info[host], $db_info[username], $db_info[password]) or die (mysql_error());;
mysql_select_db ($db_info[dbname], $db_connection) or die (mysql_error());
$viewannouncementsquery ="SELECT id, heading, announcement, startdate, enddate FROM bulletinboard WHERE approved ='y' ORDER BY id";
$result = mysql_query($viewannouncementsquery) or die('Query failed: ' . mysql_error());
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
	$enddate = 	mysqldate_to_unix_timestamp($row['enddate']);
	$today = date("Y-m-d");
	$todaysdate = 	mysqldate_to_unix_timestamp($today);
	if ($enddate - $todaysdate > 0) {
		$row['heading'] = htmlentities($row['heading'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
		$row['announcement'] = htmlentities($row['announcement'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
		
		echo '<item>
      			<title>'.$row['heading'].'</title>
				<link>http://www.concordtv.org/site/cbbrss</link>
				<description>'.$row['announcement'].'</description>
				<pubDate>'.$row['startdate'].'</pubDate>
				 <guid>http://www.concordtv.org/site/cbbrss</guid>
		  </item>';
	}
}
echo '</channel>
</rss>';

                                              

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u can filter/replace special characters with a function i get it from EE site. even u can use it for form inputs as well

function rssFilter($txt) {
      $dbData[0] = '/\'/';
      $dbData[1] = '/\'/';
      $dbData[2] = '/\/';
      $dbData[3] = '/\/';
      $dbData[4] = '/\/';
      $dbData[5] = '/\/';
      $dbData[6] = '/\`/';
      $dbData[7] = '/\`/';
      $dbData[8] = '/\?/';
      $dbData[9] = '/[\-]/';
      $dbData[10] = '/_/';
      $dbData[11] = '//';
      $dbData[12] = '/ý/';
      $dbData[13] = '/\/';
      $dbData[14] = '/&/';
      $dbData[15] = '/[\]/';
      $dbData[16] = '/[\]/';
      $dbData[17] = '/þ/';
      $rssData[0] = '';
      $rssData[1] = '';
      $rssData[2] = '';
      $rssData[3] = '';
      $rssData[4] = '';
      $rssData[5] = '';
      $rssData[6] = '';
      $rssData[7] = '';
      $rssData[8] = '';
      $rssData[9] = '-';
      $rssData[10] = '-';
      $rssData[11] = '-';
      $rssData[12] = '';
      $rssData[13] = '';
      $rssData[14] = 'and';
      $rssData[15] = '-';
      $rssData[16] = '-';
      $rssData[17] = '';
      $txt = preg_replace($dbData, $rssData, $txt);
      return $txt;
}

$heading = rssFilter($row['heading']);
$announcement = rssFilter($row['announcement']);
                
echo '<item>
<title>$heading</title>
<link>http://www.concordtv.org/site/cbbrss</link>
<description>$announcement</description>
                                              

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filter.php

This is excellent for getting rid of the weird characters, but what about when I want to us
nl2br
so the entries in the database maintain their line spacing?
It still doesn't work on the RSS feed. You can see on the Community Bulletin Board page on the website, there is spacing in the announcements because I am using nl2br
but  the text of the announcement disappears when I use nl2br on the RSS page.

nl2br will just replace new line to <br>

But when I use it, none of the text shows on the page, so am I doing something wrong?

can u  post complet code for the user inputs

Here it is

if (isset($_POST['submit']))  // If the form was submitted, process it.
	{
 		while(list($key, $value) = each($_POST))
		{
			$value = trim($value);
			$value = mysql_real_escape_string($value);
	//echo "$key = $value<br>";
		}
	
 
	$_POST['name'] = addslashes($_POST['name']);
	$_POST['address'] = addslashes($_POST['address']);
	$_POST['title'] = addslashes($_POST['title']);
	$_POST['heading'] = addslashes($_POST['heading']);
	$_POST['announcement'] = addslashes($_POST['announcement']);
	$announcementtitle = htmlentities($_POST['title'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
	$announcementheading = htmlentities($_POST['heading'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
	$announcement = htmlentities($_POST['announcement'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
 
	$startdate =$_POST['cbbstartyear'].'-'.$_POST['cbbstartmonth'].'-'.$_POST['cbbstartday'];
	$enddate = $_POST['cbbendyear'].'-'.$_POST['cbbendmonth'].'-'.$_POST['cbbendday'];
	$newenddate = daysDifference($enddate, $startdate);
 
 
	$insertannouncementquery = "INSERT into bulletinboard VALUES  ('0', '".$_POST['name']."', 
		'".$_POST['organization']."','".$_POST['email']."','".$_POST['address']."','".$announcementtitle."',		
		'".$_POST['phone']."','".$startdate."','".$newenddate."','".$announcementheading."','".$announcement."','n')";
 
	$insertquery = mysql_query($insertannouncementquery) or die (mysql_error());
	echo '<div class="alert">Your bulletin board announcement has been submitted. It will appear on the bulletin board when it is approved by CCTV. Thank you.</div>';

                                              

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Hi, Nan.  I think a better strategy would be to keep the client input as close to "stet" as possible, and only use things like htmlentities() on the output side of things.  The usual mantra is "Filter Input, Escape Output" and that would imply using nl2br() on the output side of the equation.

There is also the PHP_EOL constant that you might find useful.

I think the code segment above uses a "double escape" construction - mysql_real_escape_string + addslashes is too much.  Choose only the mysql_real_escape_string part of things.  I will post an example for you in a moment, showing how to do what you want here.

Best, ~Ray

@gawai: Not sure what you mean by rssFilter()
http://us.php.net/manual-lookup.php?pattern=rssFilter&lang=en

I agree about not using $_POST directly - The PHP superglobal arrays should be an immutable, read-only variable IMHO, however it is not - thus while it may be a stylistically unpleasant choice to mung the superglobal arrays, there is nothing programatically wrong with it, from PHP's perspective.

The addslashes() function, while not yet deprecated, should always be replaced with the DB-specific escape function.  See the description here:
http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.addslashes.php

Best to all, ~Ray

@ray :
rssFilter() is the user defined. i have attached the code above :)

for the rest i agree with u :)

Oh, thanks.  I overlooked that.  The current PHP technology is the "filter_var" set of functions.  I would tend toward using these instead of writing my own because they will be faster (natively implemented in C) and because latent errors will be corrected by the community.  More details here:
http://us.php.net/manual/en/ref.filter.php

I will make all these changes. It was just lazy to leave the POST variables as is.
So should I assume I can't use the nl2br on an RSS page?

Well, you CAN use nl2br() - but I guess the real question would be, "Are you writing an RSS reader?"  The presentation of RSS is done by a reader.  The preparation of RSS is done by the server and the RSS is stored in a specialized XML file.  AFAIK there is nothing that prevents you from putting break tags into your XML.

but when I used nl2br, the text disappeared, although when I viewed the source it was there.

Please show us the code that gave you the disappearing text phenomenon.

Did you try the code sample I posted above?  Except for your DB vars, it is tested and working code that should demonstrate the principles.

I already posted this code, the first bit of code in this question.

I have not implemeneted your code yet because I was waiting for an answer to the nl2br question first, and the code won't be used until someone enters an announcement on this website, which may not happen for days. Also, I work on this site in the early morning before anyone is looking at it.

Sorry, I can't see anything wrong with your sites, but maybe I do not know what to look for.  If you have a test case (always a good idea) that you can use to simulate the issues, that will make the debugging process easier, and you can test any time without worrying about who is using the live version of the sites.  

I cannot answer the nl2br questions in a vacuum - "why it's not working" may not be the right question here - there are too many things wrong with the original code sample to use it in any production capacity.  I hope you can follow my example that shows the correct way to handle client text from forms and use nl2br() correctly.  If you have any questions about that, please post back here.  

Best of luck with it, ~Ray