Corey Worrell

Convert to HTML Entities Between Code Tags

If you're ever posting a piece of code on your blog or whatever, you've probably realized that it's a pain to have to convert any special character to its HTML entity. Why not take the pain away and let PHP handle that for you?

I'm using something similar for the comments on this blog. After I read Matthew James Taylor's post about this, I tried to come up with something using a little less code.

There really isn't a foolproof method to pull this off, and I have been told that traversing the code using the DOM would be better, but this function (as ugly as it is) actually works quite well if you have a proper HTML structure with valid code.
It checks for any <code> and <pre> tags and converts any special characters inside them to there respective HTML entity. It even accounts for nested <code> and <pre> tags, as well as any attributes you give them.