[SOLVED] Convert QString to text with substitutes for HTML special characters (e.g. tags)

Convert QString to text with substitutes for HTML special characters (e.g. tags)

The user will be able to put in some text into a QLineEdit in a Qt environment. However, these input texts can contain HTML special characters. My aim is to convert this text by replacing all HTML special character occurences with substitutes.

A similar case is found in PHP with the htmlspecialchars() function http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php.

The main reason I want to do this is because I want to display the user input in a richtext QTextEdit and I don't want the user to be able to change HTML and I wish to be able to use HTML special characters without too much hassle.

How can this be achieved?

Solution

The easiest way I know, is to use QTextEdit::toHtml:

QString convert();
{
    QString s = lineEdit->text();
    QTextEdit textEdit;
    textEdit.setPlainText(s);
    QString ret = textEdit.toHtml();
    int firstClosingTag = ret.indexOf("</p></body></html>");
    int lastOpeningTag = ret.lastIndexOf(">", firstClosingTag);
    return ret.mid(lastOpeningTag + 1, firstClosingTag - lastOpeningTag - 1);
}

There are also two functions, which you could find useful:

Qt::convertFromPlainText() and Qt::escape()