Line Breaks

[Anon]

Okay, im writing a PHP message board application. I've inserted a message into my database (MySQL). This message was typed in a html form and POSTed to a php program. There happened to be blank lines in between paragraphs in this form. These blank lines now appear as a large whitespace in the database. However, when I try to output this back onto a webpage, HTML of course ignores whitespace and so the paragraphs and lines all seem to be bunched together.

So anyway I'm looking for a couple of pointers/pseudocode on how to properly output these line breaks from the database. I was thinking of coding an algorithm to replace X whitespace with a "<br>". This is messy and inefficient though. And I've never done string parsing like that with PHP 🙂

Any suggestions?

[Anon]

Okay, problem solved. nl2br() is what I want. I apologise for not RTFM before posting 🙂

[Anon]

nl2br() is probably not the best way to do it.

The following will replace blank lines with <P> and allow the the rest of the copy to "flow" naturally.

$message = ereg_replace("\r\n\r\n", "\n<P>", $message);