Problem formatting text for tab delimited file

[bradbice]

Without access to a MySQL database, I am writing to and reading from a text file for a simple CMS.

My problem lies in transferring text from a textarea input form to the tab delimited text file. Because my description field is so long and will consist of paragraphs, meaning people will be hitting "Enter" or "Return" a lot, this wreaks havoc with my tab delimited file for some reason.

I have tried many solutions. I have tried nl2br(), and this places <br>'s where there are \n's, but in the text file everywhere "Enter" was hit, there is a new line in the file.

I even tried using a "|" as the delimeter but this produced the same effect.

Some code:

<?php
$TheFile = "data/{$_POST['file']}.txt";
$Open = fopen ("$TheFile", "w");
if ($Open) {
  fwrite ($Open, "{$_POST['headline']}|{$_POST['desc']}");
  fclose ($Open);
} else {
echo "Error!";
?>

It's very simple yet it's driving me insane. I have three form fields, 'file', 'header' and 'desc'. The above code is in my handlform.php file.

I even tried photomatt's autop function and it did the same as described above. What is causing my newlines to stick around?

[devinemke]

if you don't want to store the actual newlines but just the <br>'s (which is probably easier for text file storage) then after you call nl2br(), just strip out the newlines. nl2br() puts <br> tags but still leaves the newlines in place:

$_POST['desc'] = nl2br($_POST['desc']);
$nl = array("\r\n", "\r", "\n");
$_POST['desc'] = str_replace($nl, '', $_POST['desc']);

notice that i am using an array to feed str_replace() that includes three different newlines styles:

"\r\n" = Windows
"\r" = Mac
"\n" = UNIX

this will strip out all three types.

[bradbice]

Thank you very much, that helped a lot. I just think I'm at a stage where not knowing whether to use double or single quotes will cost me hours (I know the difference now).

I appreciate the help.