Reputation: 11628

Detect a carriage return/new line in a text area with PHP

How do I detect a carriage return/new line character in a text area in PHP?

I want to replace them with   tags before storing it in the database.

Upvotes: 6

Answers (7)

Mike Wells

Reputation: 426

I know this is v-old but just wanted to make a note here, perhaps even for myself! The eols here need to be in double quotes, otherwise It just won't work. See below...

$eols = array(",","\n","\r","\r\n");
$text_area = str_replace($eols,'<br />',$_POST['text_area']);

Hope this helps someone not waste time like I just did for 30mins!

Upvotes: 4

Yoshi

Reputation: 54659

My advice: "don't do it". Just store the line breaks in the db, but render it to   only when producing the output. Otherwise you'll have the problem of replacing the   when you want to use that data in a different context.

For that, you can use nl2br See: http://php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php

Upvotes: 8

Brad

Reputation: 163612

You can use the nl2br() function. This will insert   as necessary.

It is generally my preference to leave the HTML formatting out of the DB (unless it was in the source material). You never know when you may want to use the clean version for other purposes.

Upvotes: 1

Naftali

Reputation: 146360

Try this:

$text_area = str_replace(PHP_EOL,'<br/>', $text_area);

Using str_replace

Upvotes: -1

NikiC

Reputation: 101956

Just nl2br it ;)

PS: Don't apply the function when inserting to the database (use only SQL escaping here). Apply the function as soon as you want to output the text to HTML.

Upvotes: 4