Carrying a [Backspace] through forms

Anon

Hello,

I am writing a news script for a website I am creating, So far, progress has been pretty good, but I ran into a small problem today.

First of all, here is the address:
http://tntklan.dhs.org/tntpage/update.php

Use gummy/gummysql for login/pass

The problem is that the form only submits spaces through the url, it doesnt allow the creation of new paragraphs, for example. If I typed in this:

Hello, this is a test of the posting system

Just pushed enter, and here is another line

it shows up like:

Hello, this is a test of the posting system Just pushed enter, and here is another line

All of it is on one line. How do I carry a [Enter] through the form?

Anon

You can control the wrapping with 'wrap=xyz' in the textarea definition. ('wrap=soft' or 'wrap=virtual' are most likely what you want: these retain newlines explicitly put in by the user, but not ones created by the automatic word wrapping.)

But before you do this, make sure it's not just an html problem! You are aware that html treats any amount of whitespace as a single space so if you just take the data from the textarea and display it, that is what you will see. To see the actual line-endings, display it inside a <pre> section.

Anon

Thanks for the reply Kirk,
I tried the wraps, I applied them to the textbox, and nothing changed, then i tried <pre>, and the news lost it's wrapping. What I am doing now, is saving the form data into a database, and retriving from the database. I think that in that transition, the formatting tags get lost, do you know of a command to pass the formatting tags through mysql?

Anon

You can't have it all, at least not easily. There are two pieces here: getting data from the textarea, and displaying the data on an html page. What should be a non-issue is the storage: assuming you are using addslashes() directly, or have magic quotes turned on, then the data will go into mysql without any problems. The same is perfectly true of html tags and html entities: none of these has any special meaning to mysql, so you shouldn't expect any problems from that part of the system.

Do you have another (non-html) way to retrieve the data from your database? I have found, when working on database-driven sites (mostly using postgresql) that logging on to the box via telnet and running the command-line query utility to be extremely useful for debugging this kind of thing.