CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlnewline
Slatan-ko
Slatan-ko

Reputation: 266

Not getting a new line when using use "\n" in PHP

I am trying to use \n in PHP to get a new line on my website, but it's not working.

Here is my code:

if(isset($_POST['selected'])){
    $selected_val = $_POST['selected']; 
    // Storing Selected Value In Variable
    echo "\n";
    echo $selected_val;  // Displaying Selected Value
}

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4832

Answers (4)

Rein
Rein

Reputation: 3351

This essentially boils down to saving the below text to a HTML file and expecting it to have visual line breaks:

one line
another line

To have a visual line break in HTML you're gonna need the br element:

one line<br />
another line

So replace your echo "\n"; with echo '<br />';.

If you have a string containing newlines, you could use the php built in nl2br to do the work for you:

<?php

$string = 'one line' . "\n" . 'another line';
echo nl2br($string);

Upvotes: 3

John Slegers
John Slegers

Reputation: 47101

When writing PHP code, you need to distinguish between two distinct concepts :

  1. go to the new line in the code you produce, which you do using "\n"
  2. go to the new line in the HTML webpage you produce, which you do using <br />

So, Option 1 makes you go to the new line in the code you produce, but you will not go to a new line in the HTML webpage you produce. The same way, option 2 makes you go to the new line in the HTML webpage you produce, but you will not go to a new line in the code you produce.

If you want go to the next line in both your code and the HTML output, you can just combine "\n" and <br /> :

echo "<br />\n";

Upvotes: 2

Dfaure
Dfaure

Reputation: 584

On a web page, out of a <pre> block, all occurrences of tabs and newlines characters are assimilated as a single space.

For example:

echo "<pre>\n" . $selected_val . "</pre>";

But if your code is for debugging purposes, you'd better use print_r to inspect your variable values. Such as:

echo "<pre>" . htmlspecialchars(print_r($select_val), true) . "</pre>";

The htmlspecialchars function preserving you from ill-formed HTML due to the variable content.

Upvotes: 0

Edu C.
Edu C.

Reputation: 408

On echo, use <br />.

The \n won't work in the HTML page, only in the source code, executing the PHP from the command line or writing into a text file.

Upvotes: 3

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