explode textarea php (at new lines)

Question

can I do:

explode("\n", $_POST['thetextarea']);

and have it work on all platforms? (The question I am asking is will it ever be \r\n and not just \n")

EDIT:

I forgot to mention that I am saving $_POST['thetextarea'] to a mysql database VARCHAR 255. It seems \r\n is converted to \n.

possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/760282/do-line-endings-distinctions-apply-for-html-forms — Arnaud Le Blanc, Aug 14 '11 at 16:44
If the text field contains `\r\n` then spliting on newlines would still work, and just keep extraneous carriage returns in the lines. — mario, Aug 14 '11 at 16:45

score 101 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 14 '11 at 16:56

101

This will do the trick given \r\n, \r or \n:

preg_split('/\r\n|[\r\n]/', $_POST['thetextarea'])

answered Aug 14 '11 at 16:56

Long Ears

1

Yup. Worked for me too, not the \r\n one. – khany Feb 11 '15 at 13:32
with a bit difference worked for me, double quote instead of single "/\r\n|[\r\n]/" and I don't know why – Vahid Dec 02 '19 at 12:55

PeeHaa · Answer 2 · 2011-08-14T16:59:08.630

24

You should use:

explode("\r\n", $_POST['thetextarea']);

It will always be the same.

Browsers and other user-agents will make sure they are :-)

edited Aug 14 '11 at 16:59

answered Aug 14 '11 at 16:47

PeeHaa

1

Not all user agents are browsers however. – mario Aug 14 '11 at 16:54
@mario: also according to the HTML5 spec (draft I know) lines are terminated by `CRLF`. http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-textarea-element if I'm correct – PeeHaa Aug 14 '11 at 17:09
new link is http://w3c.github.io/html/sec-forms.html#the-textarea-element – piotr_cz Sep 30 '18 at 17:51

score 12 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 14 '11 at 16:47

12

You could also use the PHP_EOL constant:

explode(PHP_EOL, $_POST['thetextarea']);

answered Aug 14 '11 at 16:47

Sascha Galley

12

wouldn't PHP_EOL just use the linebreak of the current platform? If so, you don't want it here :) – PeeHaa Aug 14 '11 at 16:53

score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Jun 23 '16 at 07:31

2

You can do something like this:

$text = trim($_POST['textareaname']);
$text = nl2br($text);

edited Jun 23 '16 at 07:31

Rich Benner

answered Jun 23 '16 at 07:10

Jatin Babbar

1

"It's important to remember that this function does NOT replace newlines with
tags. Rather, it inserts a
tag before each newline, but it still preserves the newlines themselves!" - guy at php.net manual – Robbe May 06 '17 at 20:55

4 Answers4