nl2br question

adavis

I have a form with a text box. When I do an nl2br on the output. If there are single new line characters, then it seems to work okay, but if there are two new lines together (\n\n), then it just converts the first one and leaves the second one alone. What is the best way to take care of this? Would it be:

$text = nl2br(nl2br($_POST['text']));

That might take care of \n\n, but what if for some unknown reason, my user entered \n\n\n, or more?

stfuji

try the comments:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php

They offer some nice ways to enhance or replace this function.

-Geoffrey

adavis

Instead of nl2br, should I be following this suggestion?

If you want deleted the newlines, or replace it. remember:

When you press "ENTER" (textarea, for example). Add two chars to your $string. one: \n and the other: \r

most replace the \n AND deleted \r for a clear string.

this fix your problems with .txt or .cvs Excel data.
<?

function clear_newline($text) {

  $text = ereg_replace("\n", "<br>", $text);
  $text = ereg_replace("\r", "", $text);

  return $text;
}
?>

stfuji

I think the answer you are looking for depends on the output you need.

I would be inclined to use the following


function mynl2br($text){

 return ereg_replace("\n", "<br />\n", $text);

}

this will preserve the trailing \n just like nl2br but will work on all encountered \n s

however you could just use


function mynl2br($text){

 return ereg_replace("\n", "<br \>", $text);

}

and that would actually replace the \n with <br > tags

if you are concerned about the carriage returns and the newline character you will need to do what your previous post implied. The carriage returns do export nastily in Excel they make those strange looking box thingies.

I believe you can also use the

str_replace

function to do the same things
Hope that helps,

Geoffrey

adavis

This issue is starting to become clearer to me. For instance, I didn't realize that when I hit the [Enter] key on my keyboard in a text box that both the "\r" for carriage return and the "\n" for new line are inserted into the text. The nl2br just takes care of the \n, but not the \r. I think for my needs, I need to convert the \n to a <br /> and the remove the \r. The other thing that I didn't realize is that if you set the wrap on a text box to "hard" then it puts a \r\n at the end of each wrap, not just when you hit the [Enter] key.