file's contents into textarea

Anon

I am working on something that will allow you to modify a file's contents using an html form.
If I start a new line in the textarea, when I go back to modify the file, there is a blank line between the first line and the new line... example:
originally:
Hello

modding:
Hello
World

reloaded:
Hello

World

so it seems to be adding in extra "\n"s and I don't know why. I have tried using $contents=file();
for($i=0; $i<count($contents); $i++){
$trim($contents[$i], "\n");
}
and other things, including imploding the $contents array into one string (using the example for loading a file into a string in the manual under file()), but nothing seems to be working. I am not sure if it is happening when I actually write the file, or when it loads the file into the textarea.
anyone have any ideas?

thanks,
Paddy

mp96brbj

I'm guessing you're posting the form from a Windows machine. I THINK the story behind this is that a long time ago, Windows/DOS decided to be incompatible with all other OS's and use two characters for linebreaks instead of one. They used Carriage Returns or something like that. (Sounds really stupid IMHO, but maybe it made sense back then. I am, as you might have guessed, unsure on the matter. 😉

The bottom line is that when the data is posted from a Windows machine, it does not use "\n" for linebreaks but "\n\r", so try trimming away "\r" as well.

Anon

hmm, tried
trim($oldcontents[$line], "\n\r");
still same thing
thanks for suggestion tho

mp96brbj

Hmm... try this, then:

$contents=implode("\n", file());
$contents=str_replace("\r", '', $contents);

If that doesn't work, try to find out exactly which characters are used in the linebreaks. I always end up tearing my hair over this dilemma. 😉

Anon

damn, still not working 🙁

I wonder if maybe it's when it's rewriting the file that it adds in the extra ones... I will try trimming out "/n" before it rewrites the file

Anon

damn, still no go 🙁

I tried trimming out \n\r before I write it
and before I try to display it.

Anon

I found a solution at this post:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/forum/read.php3?num=2&id=118842&loc=0&thread=118842

the key lied in doing this:
$HTTP_POST_VARS[modmessage] = ereg_replace("\r", "", $HTTP_POST_VARS[modmessage]);
before the file was rewritten. So you were close with your ideas 🙂 but I don't understand why trim didn't do it.