Hi ewyong, here is the explanation that will help you understand : the problematical part is not the writing into the DB, but the displaying of the data at the page(in the textarea). Here are some tips for you:
1. Within the saving of the data from forms you ony have to take into account that some DB engines will not accept some characters, such as quote or double quote. For example : you have a form on your page from which's fields you will store the data into the DB. User will write some text into the fields with quotes in it. Your DB will return error or will not store the quotes. Therefore you must to every quote in the text add one additional quote after it or before it, no matter where. The important thing is that you must do this before you send the data into the DB. You can achieve this by regular using of the REPLACE command.
2. The second thing you will do with your data will surely be the displaing of it on your webpage. Before you post any data to browser you have to Server.HTMLEncode it. Here is one very helpful function for you, which you can use for "translation" of the variable into the format that can be sent to browser. If you will use this you can see that all the ENTERs(in paragraphs) and all other special characters will be displayed in the right format, exactly as they were written in and submitted by the form:
function ToHTML(strValue)
if IsNull(strValue) then
ToHTML = ""
else
ToHTML = Server.HTMLEncode(strValue)
end if
end function
You can use it for example in this way:
Response.Write ToHTML(strTextToBeShownOnThePage)
enjoy
Kamil
