Help with replacing a string

[ali_p]

Hi, I have a problem where I am using a textarea formatting box, quite similar to the one on this site, which gives you fonts, textsize etc. However my problem is when the user doesn't enter anything in the box but the cursor has entered it '<br />' is being saved to my database table. I need my fields to be totally clear if they do not contain data.

I have looked for help at the makers of this tool, however they inform me that it is a browser issue.
So my next step is to see if I can restrict this occurance of <br /> from entering my tables. If I use str_replace will that replace all occurances of <br /> ? I can't have this as then my text will be without line breaks. Can anyone think of a way or perhaps direct me to a solution that will solve this please.

Many thanks and regards

[paul_mac]

Surely if the string only contains <br /> then you can do a simple test of the length and if it is 6 characters then replace the <br /> with nothing otehrwise leave well alone?

Paul

[bradgrafelman]

If it's automatically being converted to <br />, then look for some PHP processing code that uses [man]nl2br/man on the incoming data before it is added to the database.

[ali_p]

bradgrafelman wrote:

If it's automatically being converted to <br />, then look for some PHP processing code that uses [man]nl2br/man on the incoming data before it is added to the database.

Thanks for the advice but I'm a a little unsure of what you mean here, do you mind explaining.

Thanks

[bradgrafelman]

If this textarea has been turned into some rich textbox with formatting (e.g. via Javascript), it may be that the client-side code is adding the final line ending (for some reason) and then converting it to an HTML break.

You might try doing a print_r() on the incoming $_POST array and see if the '<br />' is already there. If it isn't, then I assume the script uses [man]nl2br/man somewhere in processing the POST'ed data (which now contains a line break instead of being simply empty, for whatever reason).

You could always replace '<br />' with "\n" (the line break character) and then [man]trim/man the POST'ed data. If the data is simply one line break (as you have said), then trim() will return an empty string.

[ali_p]

Thanks bradgrafelman, I will try your second suggestion and see how I get on.
I know that the users browser has something to do with it too, as typically when i try to test this no <br / >s are entering the database.

Thanks again