Gossamer Forum: Products: Gossamer Forum: Discussion: Bizarre problem -- GT PLEASE HELP!!!

I'm using the search highlighting plugin and I'm having a problem that is DRIVING ME CRAZY Crazy

If you put the following tag in the search results loop:

Code:
<%if post_message%> 

    <%post_message%>  

<%endif%>

as expected it will print out the entire post with the search terms highlighted for each record in the search results...

But if I try to shorten the post to 200 characters by running it throught the following global

Code:
sub { 

	my $p = shift; 
	return = substr($p,0,200); 
}

as follows:

Code:
<%if post_message%> 

        <%html_strip($post_message)%> 

<%endif%>

The post gets html escaped and all the html entities are returned as encoded: ie < for <, > for >, etc

NOTHING I do to unescape the string seems to effect it! For example:

Code:
sub { 

	my $p = shift; 
	$p = substr($p,0,200); 
	return GT::CGI::html_unescape($p); 
}

I've tried regex:

Code:
sub { 

	my $p = shift; 
	$p = substr($p,0,200); 

	# convert &lt; and &gt; to < and > 
	$p =~ s/&gt;/>/g; 
	$p =~ s/&lt;/</g; 
	return $p;	 
}

Even just passing through the variable html escapes the string:

Code:
sub { 

	my $p = shift; 
	return $p;	 
}

So there must be something going on in the global parsing behind the scenes...

ps. I've also tried HTML::Entities.

GT? Anybody? Help? There must be a solution...