[RESOLVED] Trim text area string

reddrum

Hey All

I have a text area on a form that sometimes gets extra carriage returns. I removed them with the trim function but when I update that string to the db I still have some kind of carriage return when I redisplay the data.

$text = $_POST['txtMessage'];
$text = trim($text);
$chk = preg_match("/\r/", $text);  //$chk = 0

What have I missed?

Jack_McSlay

why do you say you're picking up extra carriage returns actually? they have no actual meaning on HTML. and why do you say you're picking up extra carriage returns if your preg_match tells there's none on the string?

NogDog

If you are displaying the data within <textarea> or <pre> HTML tags, make sure there are no newlines between the tags and the text being output. For example, this will output newlines before and after the text:

<textarea name="example">
<?php echo $someText; ?>
</textarea>

This will not:

<textarea name="example"><?php
echo $someText;
?></textarea>

reddrum

What is happening is, if someone hit enter 5 times after they typed there text there is 5 extra lines saved to the db in spite of the fact that I ran trim on the string. If they don’t hit the enter key there are no extra lines when the string is redisplayed from the database to another text area.

NogDog

Are you using a plain <textarea> for input, or some WYSIWYG version like TinyMCE or FCKeditor? If the latter case, it may be inserting <br /> tags for line breaks, which you would then need to delete via a replace function using preg_replace() or str_replace().

PS: the preg check for "\r" might not be telling you anything, as you may only be getting "\n" for newlines.

reddrum

Never mind trim works as it should, its my brain dont. I had the wrong var in my update query.
Thanks for help!