Edit:

my app allows users to post comments for all other users to see. I want to allow users to make certain words in their comment bold or italic etc, so that when they post a comment other people will also be able to see the bold words etc.

At the moment i am able to make the words bold but when the text is saved to my remote database server it is saved as normal text and i am unable to find out which words were bold and which arn't.

How can I preserve the bold/italic/underlined... formatting when saving the text from an EditText?