[RESOLVED] Text Field line breaks

tobywallis

Hi. I am parsing a form from a previous page. That page has a textarea where the user enters several email addresses, one per line. It is passed to page 2 by a POST.

I then break up the email addresses by using nl2br and then exploding it into an array using <br /> as the delimiter string. All works fine (I also keep the original version of the textarea contents just to be safe...)

Then I need to create a hidden form field in page 2 with a list of the email addresses, thus:

<input type="hidden" name="recipients" value="email1,email2,email3" />

(i.e. no breaks between addresses and/or commas)

I do this with a foreach loop on the array from the explode function. Each iteration does $list.=$element.",";

However when I view the resultant HTML source, there is a break between the email addresses, thus:

I've tried str_replace with \n, \r, \n\r, chr(106), rtrim and everthing else I can think of but I can't get the line to concatenate without a break.

I've also tried using the original textarea contents and doing the above operations in case it's being added by the foreach loop or the array elements, but the results are the same - line breaks.

I would be REALLY grateful for any help! This is driving me crazy.

Thanks

===Toby Wallis===

paulnaj

Try the trim() function ...

$list.=trim($element).",";

tobywallis

paulnaj;10924930 wrote:
Try the trim() function ...
$list.=trim($element).",";
P.

Thanks for the suggestion Paul, but I tried that before I posted my thread and it didn't work... I just re-checked it in case I had done something wrong but - same result.

===Toby===

paulnaj

Hi Toby,

Ah yes you mentioned it - didn't notice first time round. You might want to check out the manual entry for nl2br - especially the user comments at the bottom of the page.

It seems (maybe you know this already) that nl2br actually adds replaces the newline with < b r / > \ n as opposed to just < b r / >.

(I've put spaces between all the characters above just to get it through any formatting rules on the site).

tobywallis

paulnaj;10924934 wrote:
Hi Toby,

Ah yes you mentioned it - didn't notice first time round. You might want to check out the manual entry for nl2br - especially the user comments at the bottom of the page.

It seems (maybe you know this already) that nl2br actually adds replaces the newline with < b r / > \ n as opposed to just < b r / >.

(I've put spaces between all the characters above just to get it through any formatting rules on the site).

P.

Hi Paul. Yes, I saw that in the manual as well. But

str_replace("\n","",$element")

doesn't work either. I'm stumped.

paulnaj

Hmm,

OK this is my normal method of dealing with textareas. First of all I convert all versions of the 'newline' to \ n ...

function cleanBreaks($value){
	$value = str_replace("\n\r", "\n", $value);
	return str_replace("\r", "\n", $value);
}

... to get on a level-playing field. Then just explode on the newline. Don't seem to remember having problems doing it this way.

tobywallis

paulnaj;10924944 wrote:
Hmm,

OK this is my normal method of dealing with textareas. First of all I convert all versions of the 'newline' to \ n ...
function cleanBreaks($value){
	$value = str_replace("\n\r", "\n", $value);
	return str_replace("\r", "\n", $value);
}
... to get on a level-playing field. Then just explode on the newline. Don't seem to remember having problems doing it this way.

P.

Paul - good point. Maybe the nl2br is screwing it up. I'll try just using \n as the explode string as you suggest.

===Toby===

tobywallis

Paul...

...yes, that was it. Obviously the <nl2br> was screwing everything up. All sorted now.

Moral of the story: Don't try explode after <nl2br> or you will go to hell!

Thanks for your help/suggestions.

===Toby===

paulnaj

Hi Toby,

Cool - remember to mark the thread resolved (see the thread tools at above the first post).

tobywallis

Done. Thanks, Paul.

===Toby===