Textarea Line Breaks

nickdrums

I'd love to know how to crack this one!

I'm reading data from a form, and storing in a MySQL DB. The form includes a textarea. The textarea field goes straight into the database. I then use nl2br() to format the field when displayed.

Input from some users has extra line breaks at the width of the textarea box.

I want to preserve the hard line breaks but get rid of the soft textarea ones.

Appreciate any help ...

Nick.

Drakla

Try adding WRAP="virtual" to your textarea, and you've probably done it, but include the closing textarea tag straight after the opening one, not on a newline - If you've got dynamic content inside put it straight after that - something like:

<textarea name="teststring" cols="60" rows="5" wrap="VIRTUAL"><?=htmlspecialchars(@$_REQUEST['teststring'])?></textarea>

bradgrafelman

Not sure if this makes a difference, but note the differences in line breaks:

Windows uses CRLF (\r\n)
Unix uses CR (\n)
Mac uses LF (\r)

dewen

it's hard to make diff between "hard" and "soft" line breaks, it's up to the users. I think the best is you teach user how to use with your interface.

nickdrums

Guys,

Thanks for your thoughts. I had "wrap=physical" in my HTML, so I strongly suspect that changing this to virtual will solve the problem.

However, as my system doesn't generate the problem, I can't recreate it, and therefore can't test! Any thoughts on this last bit?

Nick.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by nickdrums
However, as my system doesn't generate the problem, I can't recreate it, and therefore can't test! Any thoughts on this last bit?

Might the behaviour be client-dependent? Have you tested in several different ones? Which ones are your users using?

nickdrums

Good point - isn't there a PHP system variable which tells me which browser the user is using? I could store this on the database and check back if any new problem records appear ...

Just had a look on php.net, and $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] would seem to give this info.

Nick.