Formatting blocks of text from MySQL database

[jc_gmk]

I am creating a database with various products in.
One of the fields will be a desciption field.

Most of the text needs line breaks in.
Do I edit the text to include <br />'s before i enter it into the database? or is there some kind of PHP function that will include line breaks after it's called.

How would this post look in a database? Would you see all the <br />'s?

[thetestingsite]

You could use nl2br before posting to the db (this would convert any newlines in the textarea into <br /> tags before inserting into the db).

Example:

Text like this:

This is
a
test

will be converted to something like this in the db.

This is<br />
a<br />
test

Hope this helps.

[jc_gmk]

Thanks, i'll give that a go.

[Jas]

If you need the text to be formatted properly (i.e. if you have a w3c validated page) a preg_replace would work better. If not, the nl2br is a lot easier to use.

$text = preg_replace("/(.*)\n/U","<p>$1</p>",$text."\n");
#the ."\n" ensures the last line is matched --------^ 

I think that is the correct regular expression. Anyway, that would put each line in between paragraph tags, making it valid HTML/XHTML.