Menu
Community /Pin to ProfileBookmark
@NogDogDec 22.2012 — #Generally, I avoid any mark-up in the database, as it tends to make the data less usable for any purposes other than output to a HTML web page. Now, if you're sure that's the only purpose that data will serve, then no big deal (e.g. you can't imagine ever wanting to search against that table column and have to figure out how to ignore text inside of any tags). Also, if you ever want to change the mark-up for some reason (SEO tweaking?) you don't have to edit every row in that table.
As far as data normalization goes, you might want to figure out a scheme were each element would be in a separate row, perhaps with a foreign key to another table that defines where those rows are used. Then you could loop through the result set, e.g.:
(If individual list items could be used in more than one list, then you might need a separate relationship table, adding a JOIN to the above sample query.)@NogDogDec 24.2012 — #ASCII newlines probably are no problem, and can easily be replaced with <br> tags or </p></p> tags -- whatever makes sense for your output -- via things like preg_replace() or nl2br(). It's also good to filter the output with htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities() (before you add any markup to it).
list data, should i format before putting into DB, or after? when outputting to page.
I just wanted to run this by the group, to get feedback / opinions
i’m adding some functionality to a shopping cart’s product data.
in the product table i want to add a features list per product. what i’m questioning is this:
should i put the text into the database cell with just line breaks, and then add the mark-up
(<ul><li> etc. ) when outputting/formatting for a webpage?,
OR should i do the mark-up first and then put into the table. if i remember, it’s better to not
to add HTML to the table itself, but to convert to special chars(?).
mucho thanks for feedback
Sign in
to post a comment4 Comments(s) ↴
0
@NogDogDec 22.2012 — #Generally, I avoid any mark-up in the database, as it tends to make the data less usable for any purposes other than output to a HTML web page. Now, if you're sure that's the only purpose that data will serve, then no big deal (e.g. you can't imagine ever wanting to search against that table column and have to figure out how to ignore text inside of any tags). Also, if you ever want to change the mark-up for some reason (SEO tweaking?) you don't have to edit every row in that table.As far as data normalization goes, you might want to figure out a scheme were each element would be in a separate row, perhaps with a foreign key to another table that defines where those rows are used. Then you could loop through the result set, e.g.:
[code=php]
$sql = "select item from some_table where list_id = $list_id";
$result = $db->query($sql);
echo "<ul>n";
while($row = $db->fetch($result)) {
echo "<li>".$row['item']."</li>n";
}
echo "</ul>n";
[/code](If individual list items could be used in more than one list, then you might need a separate relationship table, adding a JOIN to the above sample query.)
0
@NogDogDec 24.2012 — #