line breaks recognised by MySQL?

Anon

Can a MySQL database recognise line breaks within a chunk of text?

My problem is that when adding text to the db through a web form, the line breaks included in the textarea are ignored when the data is added to the db, and therefore the formatting is lost when the db spits it back out onto a webpage.

HTML tags such as <br> work fine but are not very friendly to a non-HTML-savvy person...

Any thoughts?...

Phil

Anon

This is not a problem!

when you call a text field from DB.. just put that into this build function in PHP

nl2br(row[yourtextfield])

voila...
that's all..

Anon

wow, cheers mate for the speedy reply!

Works like a treat - I guess next time I'll do a proper forum search !

sepodati

The problem is that the newlines are there. If you log into MySQL and look at your data, you'll see the newlines (a literal new line, not the code). If you look at the source of your html file, you'll see that the newlines are there also. But, HTML doesn't render newlines, only breaks (<BR>), so it looks like the newlines are being ignored. The nl2br() function tries to help by adding in <BR> where there are newlines. Unless it's been changed in the latest version of PHP (haven't checked lately) the newline are still there with the <BR> added in. It should appear correct when viewed in a browser...

Hope that helps explain what's going on...

---John Holmes...