textarea unwanted breaks

zeberdeee

i have a textarea which works fine except if someone puts loads of returns in.
in the html you can have maxlength, is thier not a maxrows? no i think.
the textarea attribute is "wrap", but someone can still just put there own returns in
basically i want to stop something like this :

see all those breaks?
thanks for any help.

scoppc

only if you are using nl2br()

laserlight

nl2br() wont work.

I think the solution would be to remove consecutive newlines using say, regex when you receive the form data.

scoppc

I mean, you will be having that kind of return if you are using nl2br() before echoing the data. So, by not having such function, you'll be completely safe coz HTML cant understand \r\n and will not output it to the browser.

All of the text will be displayed inline.

You can limit the number of characters by checking the length of the string: strlen() function.

zeberdeee

i use nlb2r cos i want new lines shown as breaks, but i want to stop needless multiple breaks, have tried to convert 3 breaks to 1 ie, put this in a loop until no change:
STR__REPLACE("\n\n\n","\n",$input) but it does not work, what is the char i should search for

ok update guys, the nlb2r replaces"\n" with so its the i search and replace, and it works
no still dont worh you actually get:
 
 
 
 
 
 
in the html?
dont know ereg well, any suggestions
thanks

zeb

Here is what I do for the textarea in my guestbook:

$step0 = $_POST['texyAreaInput'];

// replace \r (\\015), \n (\\012), or \r\n (\\015\\012) with <br />
$step1 = preg_replace("/(\\015\\012)|(\\015)|(\\012)/","<br />", $step0);

// as long as there are 3 or more consecutive breaks...
while (strpos($step1, '<br /><br /><br />'))
	{// ... replace them with 2 breaks
	$step1 = str_replace('<br /><br /><br />', '<br /><br />', $step1);}

ereptur

zeb's code is nice, but I just prefer to trim the contents of the string before displaying it. using trim() will remove any non-printable characters from the end of a string (maybe the beginning too?).

HalfaBee

This should do it in one hit.

preg_replace("/((\r\n)|(\n))+/"," ", $s );

Don't you just love regex?
HalfaBee