odd problem with a textarea

stephen2002

Ok, I have a fairly basic script that just takes the contents of a text file on the server and dumps it into a text box so that the user can edit it. It has some JavaScript associated with it to facilitate the easy insertion of HTML formatting, kinda like the BBcode buttons on this forum.

Anyway, the issue is every time I update the file (take the value out of the textarea, save it to the file using fwrite(), and then pull the data back out of the file and plop it into the textarea) it doubles the number of line breaks.

For example:

I enter in:
hello
one space

So the first time the file is saved the number of spaces = 2
I hit the save button again and the number of spaces = 4
I hit the save button again and the number of spaces = 8

I have other textareas on the site that store data into a MySQL database and these don't exibit the same problem even though they use very similar code, the main difference is one reads the text into and out of a file and the other read the text into and out of a table in the database.

For some reason stripslashes() or trim(), even when used before the text is saved and before the text is put into the textarea don't do anything.

I even tried $content = str_replace("\n", "new line", $content); before the text is put into the textarea and when I put this into the text box:

testing
ONE space

I get this on the first save:

testing

new lineONE space

second save:

testing

new line

new linenew lineONE space

thrid save:

testing

new line

new linenew line

new line

new linenew linenew lineONE space

PLEASE explain! This is driving me crasy because it shouldn't be doing this.

stephen2002

humm, I'm starting to wonder if it is a windows server thing. I just uploaded it to a UNIX server with the same version of PHP and Apache as the Windows server I'm running and tried the code and it dosn't do the same thing. If anybody has a Windows build of Apache with PHP 4.3.x and would be willing to test this out, here is the stripped down code that produces the symptom.

<?php

if (isset($_POST['update']))
	{
	$file = fopen('test.txt', 'w');
	fwrite($file, $_POST['text']);
	fclose($file);
	}

print '<form name="test" action="test.php" method="POST">';
print '<textarea name="text" rows="10" cols="50">'.file_get_contents('test.txt').'</textarea>';
print '<input name="update" type="submit" value="Save"></form>';

?>

daveyboy

how are you reading the file? fread or file?

can you post your code?

bear in mind that a windows browser will probably send data with \r\n line endings. a linux server may interpret these as 2 line breaks, as linux only uses \n.

you should open your files in binary mode and use fread and fwrite to avoid line-break problems (fopen("file.txt", "wb") or "rb").

stephen2002

Writeing the file in Binary mode fixed the problem. Figures, something I spent hours trying to find out what was wrong was fixed by adding a single letter to the code.

Thanks