preserving plaintext formatting (returns, tabs)

[pkghost]

I'm working on a little script that allows allows users to post a message with a title and description and so forth with a mysql database. I'm running into trouble with the description field because it won't preserve returns or tabs entered by the user. It will accept and format html properly, however if I were to input the following:

//
Description: Lets go to

a

party tonight
//

it would come out 'lets go to a party tonight'. There must be a way, but im not sure what it is, to preserve the non html text formatting of a string in php. Can someone help?

[Frederick]

Convert new line to break <br>
nl2br()

echo nl2br($row["article"]);

[rehfeld]

since new lines in html are not rendered, you need to convert them to <br>

nl2br() is handy for that.

if you want multiple spaces and tabs to be preserved to, use str_replace

str_replace('  ', '  ', $text);

str_replace("\t", '    ', $text);

you could also use <pre> tags if you want....

[pkghost]

any disadvantage to use the <pre> tags?

[Weedpacket]

Originally posted by pkghost
any disadvantage to use the <pre> tags?

Styling? Why not try them and see?

[pkghost]

I did.. They happen to work just fine, in fact!

Thanks for the help yall