carriage returns disappear

[Anon]

I am using PHP and mysql with Linux.
I have an html form for submitting data to a mysql database. If the text submitted in includes carriage returns, they aren't there when the input is then viewed as html.

Here's the code that does the INSERT.
The fields in question are NewsStory and NewsDo.

if ("SUBMIT" == $submitstory) {
  $sql = "INSERT INTO News SET " .
         "NewsLoc='$location', " .
         "NewsStory='$story', " .
         "NewsDo='$todo', " .
         "NewsDate=CURDATE()";
  if (mysql_query($sql)) {
    echo("<P>Your Story has been added.</P>");
  } else {
    echo("<P>Error adding submitted Story: " .
         mysql_error() . "</P>");
  }
}

endif;

[amcgrath]

html sees it as a space, use the nl2br() function.....

[Anon]

the line breaks are still in your mysql database, they just don't show in html like Allen said.

I use the same type of setup for displaying tutorials and i found a great function for exactly that.

nl2br

This takes all New Line (\n) and changes it to <.br.> (obviously without the ".")

when displaying the news story
$encodedstory=(nl2br($story));

then use the new variable "$encodedstory" to display the text.

hope this helps.
-Mike

[Anon]

I'm afraid I'm too much a newbie to know how to incorporate that function. Can you tell me where you would use it in the following code, which fetches and displays the data?
The NewsStory field is the one with the line breaks in question.

<?php if ( isset($readstory) ): ?><?php

// Request the text of the specific story
$result = mysql_query(
"SELECT NewsStory, NewsDo, NewsDate, NewsLoc FROM News
WHERE NewsID='$readstory'");
if (!$result) {
echo("<P>Error performing query: " .
mysql_error() . "</P>");
exit();
}

// Display the text of the story in a paragraph
while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
echo("<P>" . "<b>" . $row["NewsDate"] . "<br>"
. $row["NewsLoc"]
. "</b></P>");
echo("<P>" . $row["NewsStory"] . "</P>");
echo("<P>" . "<b>What you can do: </b>" . $row["NewsDo"] . "</P>");
}

?>

[amcgrath]

Like this:
echo("<P>" . nl2br($row["NewsStory"]) . "</P>");