[RESOLVED] View source and newline--in case it helps anyone

GreatBigBore

Whenever I have to generate code dynamically using echo, it's difficult to debug using my browser's "view source" option, because there are no newlines in it--it's all just one long, hard-to-read string. I've poked around for a solution, and so far I've found that most people seem to think that you can just echo '\n\r' and then you'll see newlines when you view the source. I've never seen that work on any browser. You just literally see '\n\r'. After a lot of fooling around, I've found that echoing chr(10) . chr(13) seems to work. And sure, if you're generating HTML you could use '<br/>', but then you've changed your HTML, and you can't use '<br/>' if you're generating Javascript or CSS on the fly.

laserlight

GreatBigBore wrote:
I've found that most people seem to think that you can just echo '\n\r' and then you'll see newlines when you view the source. I've never seen that work on any browser. You just literally see '\n\r'. After a lot of fooling around, I've found that echoing chr(10) . chr(13) seems to work.

That's because these special characters are not parsed in single quoted strings. You should use "\n", "\r", or "\r\n" (but not "\n\r", unless you really want a newline followed by a carriage return instead of a newline sequence).

GreatBigBore

laserlight;10894481 wrote:
That's because these special characters are not parsed in single quoted strings. You should use "\n", "\r", or "\r\n" (but not "\n\r", unless you really want a newline followed by a carriage return instead of a newline sequence).

Very cool, thanks a lot. I've just now tried it and it actually works. Just think, next time someone searches the internet about this problem, they might find this thread and walk away with the real answer. You've just made history.