str_replace not working in html codes

Question

i'm working with a form one of its fields is an RTF textarea (jWYSIWYG), that is autofilled with some database information at the load of the page, all that using Symfony framework. This RTF editor can add some html tags like <p>,<b>, etc.

The trouble starts when i try to know if the textarea has been modified before sending the form: what i get from the $request is that all the html tags are coded like <p>,<b>, etc. I tryed to replace that expressions with the < and > characters so i can compare it to the stored data.

$codes = array('>','<');
$chars = array('<'   ,'>' );
return str_replace($codes,$chars,$text);

but this function returns me the same array i pass as parameter of the str_replace function. What am I doing wrong? have anyone had the same problem?

Answer 1

Try this function instead of str_replace: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars-decode.php

Answer 2

Finally discovered the problem. Was not about the html tags! the problem is (i dont know why) the jWYSIWYG adds about 24 white spaces at the end of the field, so obvously, the comparation between stored and new data results different.

i simply deleted the final whitespaces of the input this way:

$text = rtrim($text);