How do I store special html codes in a database?

Brendan · #1 (**permalink**) 11-30-2007, 03:54 PM

I am making an asp.net website for a client. A large portion of the site deals with their product database. The best part is that I received their product database as a Microsoft Word document filled with tables.

So... Converting the word doc to Excel and then importing that into MSSQL 2005 was no trouble. Everything displays fine and the database holds all the data just fine. However, all of their products are labeled with the registered or trademark symbols.

My question is what would be the best way to store these symbols and then display them?

1. Store them as the actual character? (ie: press alt+174 for ®)

2. Store them as their html code? (ie: ® or ®)

When displaying the webpage would I then need to worry about the character set that I specify? Would it have to be anything different than the most common or default?

Any thoughts would be helpful. Thanks.

DaveSawers · #2 (**permalink**) 11-30-2007, 05:45 PM

Store them as their HTML codes.

Brendan · #3 (**permalink**) 11-30-2007, 06:20 PM

Any reason why, DaveSawers? If I do store them as their HTML codes how would I go about handling the display? I encode all user input as I display it on a webpage so that it cannot affect my design either by accident or by maliciousness. Won't storing the HTML codes then result in double encoded output?

Just to try to throw you off just a bit, I don't know if the client will use this database for purposes other than the web. What if my client uses this database to pull information for a print company or vendor specific application that doesn't handle HTML codes?

Am I thinking too hard about this? Should I just let the client deal with it when they try to? That sure seems pretty unprofessional to me.

DaveSawers · #4 (**permalink**) 12-01-2007, 08:12 AM

Because then they will always display properly on a web page.

Use htmlentities (in PHP) to encode the strings for storage on the database and then, if you need them translated back again for use elsewhere, use html_entity_decode. Presumably there are ASP.NET equivalents for these PHP functions.

mwall · #5 (**permalink**) 12-04-2007, 12:50 AM

Server.HTMLEncode might be what you're after.