Load article from DB with multiple formatting?

I am trying to load content from a MySQL DB that need to be formatted in multiple ways.

For example, lets say I have a news article that I want to store in MySQL and the article contains links and lists and bold type sections and other formatting...how to I keep the article's formatting when I load it into a PHP page?

Do I have to split it up into it's different sections and then retrieve it with formatting hard-coded into the page?? That would be highly inefficient!

Thanks.

im not too sure what you mean by this, could you post some examples?

Ben,
sorry about the long-winded explanation. I figured out how to do it.

What I wanted was to take an article and post it from a database with HTML formatting intact.

Well, that was easy, I just wrote my HTML tags into the article and inserted it into MySQL as a BLOB.

It works great.

Quantum,

You shouldn't have to store it as a BLOB... It's an inefficient way of doing so. If you want to be able to keep all the HTML formatting when storing the info in a db, use the PHP function, htmlspecialchars(). The function will keep your formatting for when you retrieve it back from the db.

Also, you may want to take a look at the htmlentities().

Hope it helps.

You should only need to store data as a blob if its not text based, such as exe files, mp3s, images, etc

Exactly... BLOB stands for Binary Large OBject, which is made purposely for binary files. I would recommend the above methods...

Let us know how it works out...

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.
I am storing the data as a TEXT type and not a BLOB, my mistake. I should have made that clear in my first post...sorry.

Since I have largely varying sizes for the text I am storing I figured the TEXT type would be best. I am not indexing the fields though, so there shouldn't be a problem with speed.

So far it works fine. I am storing the content with HTML and CSS formatting embedded and It displays correctly in the browsers.

I'll read up on htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities() and possibly use those.

Thanks again.

No problems! thats what we are here for.