[RESOLVED] html tag

nuttynibbles

i have a textarea where user enter some description..
when user press the enter key it will bring them to a new line..
how do i store this new line as \n into the database??

scrupul0us

what is the type of the field you are storing it to?

side note... a better name for this thread would have been "storing new line characters in a database"

nuttynibbles

im storing the data into a varchar(255) field..

scrupul0us

better off to store in a text field that will automatically take those characters into account

nuttynibbles

i manage to do it. i use nl2br(). for example, if i type hello<enter>world, it will turn out to be
"hello 
world"

how do i make it whereby it's "hello world". meaning everything remains a single line but the determine the newline

coldwerturkey

I run all my POST data through a cleaner to escape it and to fix the line breaks

function cleanCode($dirty) {
	$clean = str_replace( "\n", "<br />", $dirty);
	$clean = mysql_real_escape_string($clean);
	return $clean;
}
$_POST['data'] = cleanCode($_POST['data']);

than if you're editing the data from the database you can use str_replace( " ", "\n", $string); to edit it

scrupul0us

any reason why you reassign it to a post var?

ideally you should:

$clean['data'] = cleanCode($_POST['data']);

nuttynibbles

hey scrupul0us, it works. by using str_replace and mysql_real_escape_string i managed to solve the problem.. tks

Weedpacket

coldwerturkey wrote:
than if you're editing the data from the database you can use str_replace( " ", "\n", $string); to edit it

Seems a bit backwards. Putting the text through nl2br when you store it in the database means that every time you want to edit it (or do anything else with it other than display it as HTML with line breaks included: maybe you don't now but you might in the future) you have to use that str_replace() to fix it (actually, since nl2br() keeps the linebreak character anyway, you'd have to do more work than that).

It would be simpler to store the data in the database as cleanly as possible, and only mess around with it for display as, when and how it is necessary.