[RESOLVED] Display SQL data with formatting

chrislead

Hi all,

Basically I am updating some data in my db with the following script:

		$LinkDesc = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['LinkDesc']);

	$sql = "UPDATE tbl_content SET content1 = '$LinkDesc' WHERE section_name = 'contribute'";

	mysql_query($sql) or die('Error, update link failed : ' . mysql_error());

All good. It inserts fine, however the user is going to be using line breaks in the data that is being inserted/updated like so:

data data data data data data data data data data
data data data data data data data data data data
data data data

data data data data data data data data data data
data data data data data data

My aim is to then select this data from the db and display it with this line break formatting intact. Currently I am successfully displaying this data but there is no formatting.

Is there a way to show this formatting??? maybe something like detect a line break (is this /n ?) and if so show this as <br /> ???

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

NogDog

Assuming you are displaying via [X]HTML, there are two simple solutions:

Wrap the output in <pre> tags:
```
<pre><?php echo $data; ?></pre>
```
Use the [man]nl2br/man function:
```
<p>
<?php echo nl2br($data); ?>
</p>
```

chrislead

Thanks for your reply, the second suggestion worked perfectly! (The first worked however it limited each paragraph to a single line. No worries though.) Thanks again.