Paragraph

[zzz]

Hi,

I have a form that stores data in a flat file. One of the firlds on the form is a <textarea>. If I put a text in a line it is stored OK, but if I use paragraphs it messes everything up. How do I fix that?

[LordShryku]

Use [man]nl2br[/man] when outputting it.

[jasonmills58]

Zzz, you mean the <p> tags, right? Will nl2br work for <p> shryku?

[LordShryku]

Should. He doesn't explain the problem in any depth, just that it "messes evrything up". More commonly, the problem being that the new lines don't show up on the page like they were entered. That's where nl2br helps.

[zzz]

I'm not very familiar with flat files, but when I said it messes things up what I meant was: paragraphs from TEAXTAREA were saved into a flat file but with a paragraph break. So any other strings below this entry saw it as a new line and all the following order of fields and values was out of order.

Currently I save values in a string separated with <del>. The question still is, how can I still keep it as between <del> and <del> without corrupting my line. It's be nice to replace that paragraph space with some sort of value and then when I open that string when reading it replace it with <P>. In fact I need it to write it as a text on some pages and as TEXTAREA value if I need to edit it. How would I do that?

[jasonmills58]

well, if $text = "blah blah blah<p>whatever"

Just use htmlentities($text)
Look here: [man]htmlentities()[/man]

[zzz]

OK, I think we're getting warmer. I'm not so sure about <P>, because I do not really enter it in the text area. It is usually a carriage return or two...

[jasonmills58]

try echoing the output of your textarea - lets see what that looks like before getting written to your file...

[zzz]

Yes, it needs to be encoded in some way. I just tried and here's the eaxct copy from my flat file:

<del>ASAsdsrfa eewr wer werwerw erwerwer werwe rwe rwe rwerwer werw erwer.

Wer wer ewrw erwerwe rwe rwer wer wer wer we rwe rwe.

Werwer werwerw erw er wer wer we rwerw e r we r we r werwerwer werwer werwerw erwerw erwer werw erwer.<del>

As you can see the parahraphs are intact... 🙁

Here's how I tried to input it:

$value3=htmlentities($_POST["value3"]);

[jasonmills58]

I know it sounds weird, but try changing

$value3=htmlentities($_POST["value3"]);

to

$value3=urlencode($_POST["value3"]);

[zzz]

interesting...

Here's how it gets now:

<del>Adasfdasdas+asd+asdasda+dasdasd+asdasda+sdasdas+dasd.%0D%0A%0D%0ANasdasd+asdasd+asdasd+asd+asd+asdasdas+dasda+sdasda+sd+asd+asd.<del>

Now, if we could only loose + I probably could convert %0D%0A%0D% to <P> on write and to /n/n in text area, hah?

[jasonmills58]

just try outputting it with urldecode()

[zzz]

VERY CLOSE!

It outputs it nicely, but without cutting it into paragraphs. Shall I run it through something like this first, before outputing it:

$value1 = str_replace("%0D%0A", "<br>", $value1);

[zzz]

Yep, it shure did the trick!

Thanks a bunch. I always thought that Alien Intelligence is somewhat superior to our human.

😉

[jasonmills58]

LOL. You're very welcome, I'm still kind of new to this myself, but I had a TON of help from this board when I started, so I'm happy to give back a little.

cheers!
jason

ps - don't forget to mark the thread resolved. 🙂