textarea using ENTER

[auriaks]

hi. I have textarea whish i use to store max 500 characters. What i want?
I want to save ENTER push's, because when my output comes, I got all written in one line. But user pushed enter to start writing from new line... If you need more info - ask. Thanks a lot

[Schmoopy]

That's because the key for enter comes back as "\n", so you have to replace all of those with "<br />" tags.

Here you go:

$text = str_replace('\n', '<br />', $_POST['textarea']); 

Remember to escape the text as well, if you're going to be inserting this into a database.

[james438]

Actually, returns are

\r\n

, but Schmoopy's code will still work just fine. I'm just being nit picky

[jscheuer1]

Actually the type of line break produced by the enter key depends upon the OS:

• Windows - CR LF (0d0a)
• 'nix - LF (0a)
• Mac - CR (0d)

The Carriage Return (CR) is represented in a regular expression by either \r or \x0d, the Line Feed (LF) by either \n or \x0a.

[Schmoopy]

Thanks for pointing that out guys

A quick question then. Based on what you've said, the code I currently put up would only count as a line break in Windows and Linux, but not in Mac?

[jscheuer1]

I would tend to think so. However, it is unclear to me if, since this is on the server side, whether the server would convert to its method. In any case though, if one used an or operator (|) one should be OK, something like (I'm not certain of PHP regular expression syntax, or what the order of precedence would be here):

'(\r\n|\r|\n)'

in place of:

'\n'

as long as that doesn't result in the Windows style line break generating two <br> tags for each. If that happened, then one would have to also employ negative look ahead and negative look behind for the single character portions of the expression.

[thetestingsite]

There is a function in PHP that already does this and it is called nl2br()

Hope this helps.

[jscheuer1]

nl2br — Inserts HTML line breaks before all newlines in a string

That would leave out Mac OS's. However, there is a strategy in the comments section of that page on nl2br that is just what I was talking about.

function Only1br($string) 
{ 
    return preg_replace("/(\r\n)+|(\n|\r)+/", "<br />", $string); 
} 

[auriaks]

Thanks guys... Also it was interesting to read all the information about OS's. Btw, is is hard to create textarea like in this forum? with insertings php bold italic size style etc? maybe someone have links, tutorials. Any info is welcome. Thanks

[jscheuer1]

Btw, is is hard to create textarea like in this forum? with insertings php bold italic size style etc?

I was thinking that something like that might be useful for what you are trying to do. It requires javascript enabled on the user's end. I found that out recently when I disabled javascript and tried posting here. I was able to, but none of the editor's features were available.

You should look here:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamici...itor/index.htm

it (also requires javascript) may be a good adjunct to your current project.

Also, if you already have a forum package, it may include an option for this sort of thing. The vBulletin package used by DD includes this javascript powered input as an option, but it must be configured to do all of what the current 'editor' here does.