Using geshi inside a textarea

Question

Yes, sound weird. But I'm trying to make a text editor inside the browser. I've seen some programs use it. Like wordpress and unet. But I'm not sure if they use a custom one or not. However, this topic explains why geshi won't work in textarea: Why isn't textarea an input[type="textarea"]? I simply get the code of the colors. Just wondering if there's a way around this. I've tried searching but I was without luck.

<textarea><?php geshi_highlight($source, 'php'); ?></textarea>

edit::the variable $source contains php code.

Output is basically the span style that geshi outputs.

Answer 1

That kind of formatting does not work in a textarea, that's one its properties. You probably want to make some HTML contentEditable, but it won't work quickly out of the box, there needs to be a mechanism where an alteration triggers new highlighting. And that would probably involve a lot of traffic to and from the server, to the point of it not being a viable solution. You probably would end up using a javascript syntax highlighter like http://jush.sourceforge.net/ or others, and I haven't actually seen a 'live' syntax highlighter editor in the wild yet (as in: only plain textareas with a syntax-highlighted 2nd box), but then again I've never been searching for it.... I like my editors local ;).