[RESOLVED] Echoing textarea - missing data on review!?

[we5inelgr]

Hi all,

I've got a textarea (in a "review" page) that I'm trying to echo what the user inputed on the previous page, but lines of data are lost.

From the input page:

<textarea name="txtArea" cols="60" rows="7" id="maxcharfield" 
onKeyDown="textAreaCounter(this,'add_txt_progressbar1',250)" 
onKeyUp="textAreaCounter(this,'add_txt_progressbar1',250)" 
onFocus="textAreaCounter(this,'add_txt_progressbar1',250)" ></textarea>

From the "review" page:

// Prior to echo the textarea, I'm doing this to convert newlines to html <br>.

$txtArea = nl2br($txtArea);  

...


<textarea name="txtArea" cols="60" rows="7" id="maxcharfield" onKeyDown="textAreaCounter(this,'add_txt_progressbar1',250)" onKeyUp="textAreaCounter(this,'add_txt_progressbar1',250)" onFocus="textAreaCounter(this,'add_txt_progressbar1',250)"><? echo $txtArea; ?></textarea>

If I echo out what's posted:

reset ($HTTP_POST_VARS);
while (list ($key, $val) = each ($HTTP_POST_VARS)) {
    echo "<font color='red'>$key</font>&nbsp;&nbsp;$val<br>";
}

I can see that $txtArea does, in fact, have multiple lines of user input (when multiple lines are entered). Yet, on the preview page, most of the input is lost/cut off/truncated so that just the first line is there and a portion of any second line (but not subsequent lines).

The Javascript there is simply to alert the user to the progress of getting to the max of 250 characters limit. It's working as expected.

There are no spaces (that I can tell), in the review page textarea code. I know that can sometimes cause a problem, so it's all one line of code verified in textpad with no newlines or spaces.

I know that I'm not converting the <br> back to newlines prior to echoing it out in the review textarea. At this point, I just want all the lines of data that was entered, to be echo'd back.

Ideas on why I'd be missing data on the "review" page here? 😕

[Weedpacket]

A couple of points of order first of all: $[man]HTTP_POST_VARS[/man] was deprecated in PHP 4.1.0 (that was over a decade ago). There is also the [man]foreach[/man] construct introduced in PHP 4.0 which is usually a better choice than the [man]while[/man] loop you have.

Have you looked at the HTML source of the (p)review page to see what exactly lies between the <textarea> tags? What is the length of the $txtArea string and how does it compare to what is visible or what was entered?

[we5inelgr]

thanks for the reply. yeah, that piece has been in place since 2004 in our test environment (commented out till now).

when I look at the review page source, I can see that the textarea does in fact have all the data entered. yet, not all of it is echo'd back in the textarea on the page.

perhaps this is an issue with the Javascript?

[we5inelgr]

well darn it. haha. when I take the js out of the textarea on the review page...all the data is echo'd as expected. over to the js forums I go 🆒