line breaks showing up as \r\n in textarea

Question

I am trying to display a data into textarea which is fetched from tables that i have submitted via another form. The issue comes up when a new line is entered.

The data getting displayed in the textarea is as

lin1\r\nlin2

it should be like

lin1
lin2

I have tried nl2br but it does not work as expected. How can i make things optimized. Thanks

You can fix this with Javascript. \r and \n are not plain HTML like
. Take a look at this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/863779/textarea-line-breaks-javascript — Kevinvhengst, Oct 24 '13 at 13:48
possible duplication of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3059091/how-to-remove-carriage-returns-from-output-of-string — Yatin Trivedi, Oct 24 '13 at 13:48

score 11 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 09 '16 at 07:47

11

This problem can be solved using stripcslashes() when outputting your data.

Please note that the method above is different from stripslashes() which doesn't work in this case.

I tried using nl2br but it wasn't sufficient either.

answered Oct 09 '16 at 07:47

andromeda

4,433
5
32
42

2

`stripcslashes` works well when outputting data back into the textarea and `nl2br` works for regular html output. Thanks for your answer. – Whip Jul 04 '18 at 09:36

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 24 '13 at 13:46

4

I hope str_replace saves you.

<?php
$str='lin1\r\nlin2';
$str=str_replace('\r\n','<br>',$str);
echo $str;

OUTPUT:

lin1
lin2

answered Oct 24 '13 at 13:46

Shankar Narayana Damodaran

68,075
43
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Wouldn't `text.replace` be a better solution? – Kevinvhengst Oct 24 '13 at 13:51

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 27 '14 at 23:34

This is a common question and the most common answers are ln2br or str_replace.

However this is just creating unnecessary code.

In reality the problem is pretty much always that you have run the data through a mysql escape function before displaying it. Probably while you were in the process of saving it. Instead, escape the data for saving but display an unescaped version.

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 30 '17 at 17:49

4

<?php echo str_replace('\r\n', "\r\n", $text_with_line_breaks); ?>

See single quotes & double quotes this is a trick.

A perfect solution for newbies.

answered Jan 30 '17 at 17:49

Tahir Afridi

190
3
14

Glade to know that it helped you. – Tahir Afridi Jun 26 '18 at 12:06
This is the same, but in php side: $observacao = str_replace(PHP_EOL,'\r\n', $observacao); – Bruno Yuzo May 01 '20 at 18:37

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 24 '13 at 13:57

you overdo quote in insert/update statement

This problem in you case you can solve doing next

<?php
$str = 'lin1\r\nlin2';
$solved_str = str_replace(array("\\r","\\n"), array("\r","\n"), $str);

var_dump($str,$solved_str);

But you need to check insert/update statement on over quotation escape symbols

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 15 '16 at 10:02

1

I would recommend using double quotes for \r\n such as "\r\n". I've never had it work properly with single quotes.

answered Feb 15 '16 at 10:02

blinkums

56
3

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 15 '18 at 11:52

For non- textarea use this function

function escapeNonTextarea($string){

    $string=str_replace(array('\n','\r\n','\r'),array("<br>","<br","<br>"),$string);
    return $string;
}

For text area use this function

function escapeTextarea($string){

    $string=str_replace(array('\n','\r\n','\r'),array("\n","\r\n","\r"),$string);

    return $string;
}

call appropriate function and pass argument

line breaks showing up as \r\n in textarea

7 Answers7