Manipulating text inputs.....

SpeedStick

Hi,

One of the values in a form I'm using is a textarea value consisting of several paragraphs of text. I'd like to be able to:

a) remove all the slashes which precede apostrophes

and

b) add <br> wherever there are line breaks

Any help on how to do so would be appreciated.

Thanks.

tomwerner

you can use the str_replace function to substitute text with something else, Why do you want to remove slashes before apostrophies, if it is going into a database don't you want the opposite to happen (slashes before quotes)?

$textarea = str_replace("\n", "<br>", $textarea);

SpeedStick

Thanks for your reply tom.

Sorry, I misworded the part of my post regarding the slashes. I'd like to remove them after calling the text from the database.

pjleonhardt

instead of doing str_replace() before sending it to the db, you can put it in the db with \n and when you display it do

$text = nl2br($text);

and to take out slashes:

$text = stripslashes($text);

hth

Lcousins

sory for digging up an old thread, it just so nearly suits what I was looking for!

first up im a bit confused, whats the difference between:

$text = stripslashes($text);

and

$text = addslashes(stripslashes($text))

I had assumed the latter would cancel itself out but seems to do what I thought the first one would do...

secondly, is there any required order in using the following on the same bit of text?

$text = stripslashes($text);
$text = nl2br($text);
$text = trim($text);

EDITED (why am I trying to use trim with those?? to get rid of mystery blank spaces at the end of entries... but its the least important part of the question)

Finally and this is a long shot, is there anyway of mimicking the insertion of things like smilies and formating text using php (I notice the ones in this forum use javascript??)? if so is it simple??
:p

thanks for any and all answers

Luke

tomwerner

Do you mean the buttons which add text like the colons and brackets for smilies or do you mean the php to process them?

For the javascript:

onClick="document.form1.textarea1.value += \': )\'"

and the php

$text = str_replace(":   )", "<img src=\"smile.gif\">", $textarea);

str_replace searches for the smiley and then inserts the appropriate html when it has to be parsed later.

I have had to make the symbol for the smilie odd to stop the board doing what it is supposed to do! I haven't tried the code out but it should work.

You would put the onClick to a button or <a> tag. The PHP would go on the page that is displaying the text on whatever you are doing eg. a forum, guestbook, etc..