[RESOLVED] PHP Character Return

mattm591

Hi,
I am trying to write a script that will be viewed by a simple application.
At current it looks like this

<?
echo "connected";
include ("db_connect.php");
$total=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM docs");
echo mysql_num_rows($total);
?>

Which at the moment returns

connected2

(because there are 2 items in the database).

However to get the program to read it correctly it needs to be outputted like this

connected
2

I realise I can use the <br> tag in an echo but this won't help me as it reads the source of the code so would just see it as connected<br>2. So how can I get php to encode a character return which would be outputted and not show up in the source code?

Thanks in advance

Matt

Piranha

It is easy to answer. And it is not easy at all.

In windows the code used is \r\n

But in other systems it can be only \r or only \n as well. You just have to try what works in your computer setup.

Edit: It is better to use "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM docs" and then retrieve that value. When the table gets big it will take time to transfer everything in the table to PHP and then let PHP count the number of rows, it is much better to let the RDBMS do that.

mattm591

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. I don't want the return to be in the program I want it to be in the PHP code. Is that not possible? And thanks for the tip on using count I was wondering if there was a simpler way.

NogDog

echo "connected\n";

mattm591

I tried that but all it has done is put in a space between the two.

NogDog

mattm591 wrote:
I tried that but all it has done is put in a space between the two.

If you're outputting HTML, then your browser will display newlines as spaces if within most HTML elements. If you want it to treat newlines as newlines, then you either need to wrap the output in <pre>...</pre> tags, or use CSS to change the element that currently contains the text to have a style of "white-space: pre".

Or if all you are outputting is this text, then output the file as plain text instead of HTML by adding the following before anything is output:

header("Content-Type: text/plain");

mattm591

Brilliant!
That worked great, thank you both very much 🙂
I have just got one more problem with this.
I changed the code to use
"SELECT COUNT(*) FROM docs"
but now it only returns 1 as the number in the table regardless of how many I have. Is this because I'm still using mysql_num_rows after it and if so what does it need to be replaced with because simply telling it to echo the result of that query gives Resource id #4

Piranha

Now you need to get the result from the database instead of counting the rows. First let's change the query a little:

SELECT COUNT(*) as no FROM docs

This makes it easier to get the value, it will get the name "no".

Now let's get the results and echo it.

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo $row['no'];

I think and hope that you will get the idea from this.

mattm591

It's all working fine now

Thanks a lot for all your help!