html in form

I have a text area for users to input text. That text is the inserted into a database and displayed on a page. How can I allow users to insert basic html into the submit form?

Just wanting basic html like p, br, href

 

You could make different codes for people to use like [p] and [link=site.com]Click here[/url]. You could use the script to turn the tags into real html after using htmlspecialchars() to filer out any other unwanted HTML.
For <br /> tags it'd be easier to use nl2br().

 

Actually, I am the only one that will be using this form. Well, myself and my partner.

SO, I am not worried about what characters and such. Current, if I put in a <p></p>, that is exactly what is displayed on the generated page. How can I make it generate html out of the characters?

 

try to use htmlentities($string) when inserting into the database.

 

Got it. Worked like a charm... Thanks for the help.

 

No problem. I came across the same problem yesterday since I'm coding and admin backend for one of my sites where I can add messages to a database.

 

use regular expression to filter out all HTML tags except p, br, href