Paragraphs and breaks allowed in text field

kjb

Hello,
I've just set up a wonderful new database at http://www.classicpyx.com/index2.php but need to make some minor improvements, about which I have no idea what to do... and wonder if anyone would be kind enough to lend a hand.
Today's challenge is to retain paragraph and break formatting in a text entry form. I know this should be an easy thing to do, and even have one such form on my site that allows this, but I just can't seem to see what it is in the code that makes the difference!
You can see what I am talking about if you leave the search field blank and click 'go' to produce a list of movies that we have entered thus far. The 'Synopsis' field will not retain paragraph breaks, while a similar field where user's post Reviews will retain formatting.
For all I know, this could be a function of how the MySQL tables are set up.
If someone could give me a clue, it would be tremendouly helpful.
Thanks 🆒

stolzyboy

ok, i think this is your problem:

you input these titles and the synopsis is in a textarea and someone is typing something like this:

this is the synopsis
and i want the new line
to show up

but it is showing up like:

this is the synopsis and i want the new line to show up

am i right, if so, you need to use nl2br()

this will convert the \n's to <br>'s for you when you don't echo it into a textarea

if you have

echo $synopsis;

use this instead

echo nl2br($synopsis);

kjb

Very nice, thanks you!
You are completely correct in analyzing my problem and what I wanted to do..
I will give your solution a try.
Is there a similar code for the paragraph breaks... which would in effect insert a blank line?
Thanks.
and I think I will give specific examples in my post from now on, thanks for the clue 😃

kjb

It Works! 😃 😃 😃 😃
Befuddled for a moment due to stripslashes being before the var; but then I looked it up and found out what it means, removed it, and used the nl2br and everything looks Wonderful!
...
Well, not as wonderful as the PHP Builder text entry fields 🙁

stolzyboy

stripslashes will strip slashes from when it was input into the database, simply wrap nl2br around that like:

<? nl2br(stripslashes($movieinfo['SYNOPSIS']));?>

kjb

Oh, Thanks for that... I had just taken stripslashes out... but now I will put it back in with the wrap.
It was probably put in there for a reason.

Thanks a bunch stolzyboy
😃