line breaks in a textarea

Question

I know when saving a textarea you can use the nl2br   or str replace to change the  n to br tags etc  However what im not sure about how to insert line breaks into a textarea  I cant seem to find much about putting the data back into a textarea with those line breaks   For example I have a form where users can update fields  So the user may enter   foo bar baz   When that is saved to the database it would be saved as   foo lt br   gt bar lt br   gt baz lt br   gt    Now when that user goes back to that form after a page refresh all the fields are automatically populated with their previous data by taking the data from the database   However the textarea shows the br tags as text instead of adding in the line breaks  i also tried changing the br tags to  n hoping the textarea would interpret these as line breaks but no joy  As well as this I also tried escaping etc   So my questions are can this be done  Or more importantly can it be done using HTML PHP  im using smarty   If that isnt possible can it be done using javascript   Examples would be appreciated   thanks for reading

User · Accepted Answer

Don t do nl2br when you save it to the database  Do nl2br when you re displaying the text in HTML  I can strongly recommend to not store any HTML formatting in the database  unless you re using a rich HTML editor as well  in which case it would be silly not to    A newline  n will just become a newline in the textarea

User · Answer

My recommendation is to save the data to database with Line breaks instead parsing it with nl2br  You should use nl2br in output not input   For your question  you can use php or javascript   PHP   str replace   lt br   gt      n    textarea     jQuery       myTextArea   val     myTextArea   val   replace   lt br   gt      N

User · Answer

The simple way    Use this to insert into mysql    msg     GET  msgtextarea      or POST and my msg field format  text  msg   htmlspecialchars  msg  ENT QUOTES   And use this for output   echo nl2br  br  msg

User · Answer

Some wrong answers are posted here  instead of replacing  n to  lt br   gt   they are replacing  lt br   gt  to  n  So here is a good answer to store  lt br   gt  in your mysql when you entered in textarea   str replace   n     lt br   gt      textarea

User · Answer

lt  php  smarty   new Smarty   smarty- gt assign  test    This is a  n Test     smarty- gt display  index tpl      gt    In index tpl    test nl2br    In HTML  This is a lt br   gt  test

User · Answer

I m not sure this is possible but you should try  lt pre gt  lt textarea gt       lt  textarea gt  lt  pre gt

User · Answer

Ahh  it is really simple  just add   white-space pre-wrap    to your displaying element css  I mean if you are showing result using  lt p gt  then your css should be  p     white-space pre-wrap

User · Answer

You could use str replace to replace the  lt br   gt  tags into end of line characters   str replace   lt br   gt    PHP EOL   textarea     Alternatively  you could save the data in the database without calling nl2br first  That way the line breaks would remain  When you display as HTML  call nl2br  An additional benefit of this approach is that it would require less storage space in your database as a line break is 1 character as opposed to   lt br   gt   which is 6

User · Answer

You can use following code    course description   nl2br   POST  course description      course description   trim  course description

User · Answer

PHP Side  from Textarea string to PHP string   newList   ereg replace    n         POST  theTextareaContents       PHP Side  PHP string back to TextArea string    list   str replace        amp  13  amp  10     r  db field name

User · Answer

This works on me    str replace array   r     n      amp  10     textareavalue

User · Answer

What I found works in the form is str replace   amp lt br amp gt    PHP EOL   textarea

User · Answer

From PHP using single quotes for the line break worked for me to support the line breaks when I pass that var to an HTML text area value attribute  PHP  foreach   videoUrls as  key   gt   value       textAreaValue     value- gt video url     n                                       HTML JS     document   ready function         var text     lt    htmlspecialchars  textAreaValue     gt        document getElementById  video urls textarea   value   text

[php] line breaks in a textarea

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