[Resolved] problem with nl2br() function

phpjaco

got the following situation, got a php/mysql website where users can submit articles.

one of the things they wanted was that they did not want to put in tags themselves such as so i have used nl2br on a 120 character wide textarea, the problem is that there are unpredictable breaks everywhere. Why is this and is there a way to full justify text (either in the textbox or in php) some other function to be used with nl2br().

my was something like this:

$newtext = nl2br($inputtext);

please help?

popcop

when i used .nl2br .... i used it like this

".nl2br($data['story'])."</td>

that me basically pulling the story from the database ans all the tag ect work fine

hope it helps

Pig

it will only cause a line break where it would naturally wrap, or where they entered a new line.

Anyway, this is prolly what you want.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.chunk-split.php

yelvington

nl2br is a useful function but probably not the right solution.

The right way to handle user input is to clean it up on input, before putting it into the database, not on output.

If people are entering text into an html textarea, you should identify paragraphs and enclose them in .... tags. Conventionally, blank lines separate paragraphs.

If you allow HTML tags on input, consider using the tidy library (built into PHP5, installable in PHP4) to clean up and validate the HTML.

phpjaco

finally I got a program which converts rich text into html text called AscToHtml

converts text files into html, and then the client just takes that text and pastes it inside the html input field. and then I just wirte it to mysql and all the tags are allready inside the copy.

thanx

phpjaco

client does not want to use third party program as everything needs to be done in the backend.

yelvington had a good idea of replacing the white spaces with tags, how do i do this? please help!?

and what if a user types in :

dummy text
dummy text

would this results in:
dummy text dummy text dummy text dummy text

or would it be:
dummy text dummy text 
dummy text dummy text

obviously i want it like the first one. so how do i do this?