Content Management: Input formatting

Anon

Hey all, bit of an issue for a PHP newbie:

I'm building a content management system for my websites, so non-technical people can post article via browser-based forms.

How can I get PHP to respect the line breaks or carriage returns that people are making in their articles?

In other words, if someone posts the following, how can I keep the paragraphs separate? (Obviously, this forum does somehow!)

Example:

My Article Title

My first paragraph.

My second paragraph.

My conclusion.

End example.

How can I get PHP to respect those spaces between paragraphs?

Thanks.
-john

Anon

I see by checking source on "this" page that PHPBuilder has put a <br> tag behind every end of s paragraph and another one before every beginning of a paragraph.

How'd they do that?

???

Anon

I've since check it out more, and found this in the PHP Manual:

string nl2br(string, string)

How do I use this? If the string I want to replace newline characters in is $body, what code do I use?

$body nl2br($body, $body) doesn't work

neither does:
$body nl2br($body, $newbody)

This is probably a stupid questions, but I am a PHP newbie, and would have appreciated EXAMPLES OF USE in the PHP manual.

Thanks for your help!
-john

Anon

Heya,

Found the answer here:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/forum/read.php3?num=2&id=100953&thread=100949

Apologies for posting when something was already available ... but I didn't even know what to search for (nl2br) when I first posted.

I'll be a little less post-happy in the future!
-john

Anon

of course you can use
$text = nl2br($text);

and also in future if you might need to stop the users entering HTML codes in the articles, which can break the theme of your webpage, you can use

$text = htmlspecialchars($text);

it will convert all the HTML chars.