PHP, why sometimes "\n or \r" works but sometimes doesnt?

Question

Well, I am abit confuse using these \r,\n,\t etc things. Because I read online (php.net), it seems like works, but i try it, here is my simple code:

<?php
    $str   = "My name is jingle \n\r";
    $str2  = "I am a boy";

    echo $str . $str2;
?>

But the outcome is "My name is jingle I am a boy"

Either I put the \r\n in the var or in the same line as echo, the outcome is the same. Anyone knows why?

Answer 1

Because you are outputting to a browser, you need to use a <br /> instead, otherwise wrap your output in <pre> tags.

Try:

<?php
    $str   = "My name is jingle <br />";
    $str2  = "I am a boy";

    echo $str . $str2;
?>

Or:

<?php
    $str   = "My name is jingle \n\r";
    $str2  = "I am a boy";

    echo '<pre>' .$str . $str2 . '</pre>';
?>

Browsers will not <pre>serve non-HTML formatting unless made explicit using <pre> - they are interested only in HTML.

Answer 2

Well in your example you've got \n\r rather than \r\n - that's rarely a good idea.

Where are you seeing this outcome? In a web browser? In the source of a page, still in a web browser? What operating system are you using? All of these make a difference.

Different operating systems use different line terminators, and HTML/XML doesn't care much about line breaking, in that the line breaks in the source just mean "whitespace" (so you'll get a space between words, but not necessarily a line break).

Answer 3

You could also use nl2br():

echo nl2br($str . $str2);

What this function does is replace newline characters in your string to <br>.

Also, you don't need \r, just \n.

Answer 4

Either use \n (*NIX) or \r\n (DOS / Windows), \n\r is very uncommon. Once you fix that, it should work just fine.

Of course, if you're outputting HTML, a line break does nothing unless it's inside <pre></pre> tags. Use <br /> to separate lines in HTML. The nl2br() function can help you to convert line breaks to HTML if needed.

Also, if you use single-quoted strings (your example has double quoted strings), \r and \n will not work. The only escape characters available in single quoted strings are \' and \.

Answer 5

In HTML, spaces, tabs, linefeeds and carriage returns are all equivalent white space characters.

In text, historically the following combinations have been used for newlines

• \r on Apple Macs
• \r\n on Windows
• \n on Unix

Answer 6

Are you displaying the results in an HTML page? if so, HTML strips whitespace like newlines. You'd have to something like use '<br />' instead of '/r/n' in HTML.