CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlforms
George Irimiciuc
George Irimiciuc

Reputation: 4633

Form deleting spaces

<form action="class.php" method="POST">
  thread link:
  <br>
  <input type="text" name="thread">
  <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

I have this simple form. Upon entering a string starting with many spaces, something like

 "           test"

my PHP code

echo 'test:'.$_POST['thread'];

will print test: test. It will erase all spaces except one.

Where did all the spaces go and why does this happen?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 81

Answers (4)

Lorenz Meyer
Lorenz Meyer

Reputation: 19915

This is the most basic thing about HTML. Any whitespace is equivalent and is treated as a single space.

You should never use multiple spaces to try to layout your text in HTML ( like you could do in Word for instance ). You should use css styles like margin or padding instead.

The answers that propose to replace the spaces with & nbsp; are correct, but they leave you on the wrong track.

Upvotes: 0

Jukka K. Korpela
Jukka K. Korpela

Reputation: 201628

The form does not delete spaces. Neither does your PHP code. The spaces are still there in resulting HTML document (generated by your PHP code in response to form submission). They just get rendered as a single space, since in most contexts, any sequence of whitespace characters in HTML content is equivalent to a single space. This is defined in CSS 2.1 spec, in the description of the white-space property.

Thus, to prevent the collapse of spaces, the simple way is to set white-space: pre in CSS. It also prevents line breaks in the content, but this is probably not a problem here. Using the pre element in HTML causes this setting, but it also sets font family to monospace.

So this is just a matter of HTML and CSS, independently of PHP. Example:

<p>         Hello world!</p>
<p style="white-space: pre">         Hello world!</p>

Upvotes: 2

Peter Popelyshko
Peter Popelyshko

Reputation: 363

You need to convert whitespaces to html entities

  $thread =  str_replace(' ', '&nbsp;', $_POST['thread'])

and now echo 'test:'.$thread will output your text with whitespaces.

Upvotes: 1

TN888
TN888

Reputation: 7739

Specification of HTMLs tells, renderer removes multiple spaces. That is useful in some cases. To avoid that, you can place content of this field in <pre></pre> block. Like that:

echo '<pre>test:'.$_POST['thread'].'</pre>';

Upvotes: 4

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