Textarea - Hyperlinks & Breaks

[jnscollier]

I'm using a textarea on my site to allow users to post comments. When they enter in a link, it shows up as plain text and not as a hyperlink. Also, when they enter breaks (enters) to space out their comment, it doesn't show that either (it just bunches it all up).

How can I go about getting these things to work? Or is using a textarea a bad choice??

i just love the eek face.

[mburt]

You must be using a server-side on the backend to post the comments. Which PHP a simple str_replace, preg_replace would work. The link is a little (actually, alot) more complicated. It's skimming the surface of BBCode.
Here's the answer for the line breaks:

<?php
$new = str_replace("\n","<br>",$originaldata)
//do something with $new (echo for example)
?>

Whereas you would change $originaldata to what was being sent.
It would help more if you described the situation better, or gave the code.

[jnscollier]

Yeah, I'm using php to display the data gathered from the textarea box.

The breaks now work, so thank you very much for that! As far as displaying links, is there a tutorial or something on this?

Thanks!