Handling <textarea>s and newlines

harryman100

Ok, here's the problem.

I have a form with a <textarea> in it. when processing it, i would like to replace the newline returns with a tag before the information is saved.

I can put the s in using nl2br() but this does not get rid of the new lines, so that when saved in a text file it is all on one line.

E.G.

Inputing this into a textarea on the form

this
is
some

text

would result in a string which looked like this:
this is some text.

not as I currently get:
this 
is 
some 
text

I can't figure out how to do this.

Many thanks in advance

ereptur

Ok, I have found a solution to this kind of. The kind of is that my code somehow generates an extra space between the and following word/paragraph.

Here's my code, may you can figure out what's wrong.

$string = $_POST['test'];
$string = nl2br($string);
$aString = preg_split("/<br \/>/",$string);
$output = '';
foreach($aString as $section) {
  $output .= "$section<br />";
}

harryman100

I have just had a thought but am running windows at the moment, not my Linux setup so can't try it out. Can anybody see why the following would not work? I will try it out tomorrow and let people know.

$text = nl2br($textarea);
$texta = explode("<br />", $text);
$final = implode("<br />", $texta);

Would this work? I don't know I will try it.

ereptur

nope, the output from the final string is

this
is
a
test

For some reason it keeps the line breaks even though you are supposedly getting rid of them with nl2br();

harryman100

nl2br() does not infact get rid of the line breaks, if you read the definition of what it does, it simply says that it places a before each ascii line break.

I have realised there was a rather important bit missing in my code (I wrote it late last night!). It doesn't actually do anything between the explode and implode.

What it needs to do is strip the first character from each part of the array.

Does anybody know how to do this? I know you can use trim() to to remove blank space, but do line breaks count as blank space, I assume they do not. Would it be possible to use something like ereg_replace() to replace the linebreaks with something? Would it be possible to just use a function like that at the start, without using nl2br() just replacing the line breaks with s?

Weedpacket

What's the array for?

$string = $_POST['text'];
$string = nl2br($string);
$string = str_replace("\n", "", $string);

harryman100

$txt = preg_replace("/(\015\012)|(\015)|(\012)/"," ",$txt);

works perfectly.