Converting \r\n to line breaks in a textarea (not using a
tag) in PHP

Question

I have searched throughout this site and google, and could not find a viable solution. There are solutions, but none seem to work for me.

I have a text area that serves as the input for a form, as well as the output (editable) when displaying the form to edit. So, I have a textarea like so:

echo '<textarea>'.$resolution.'</textarea>';

If I enter something with line breaks, it is interpreted as \r\n wherever there is a carriage return. Example:

Input: 
    This is a

    test.

Output:
    This is a\\r\\n\\r\\ntest.

Now, I found it simple to remove the extra slash by using stripslashes as follows:

$resolution = stripslashes($resolution);

...but, now the output is:

This is a\r\n\r\ntest.

I cannot figure out how to convert \r\n to a line break (that is, without using a
tag, since that would only output <br> within the textarea, where html would not be supported. I've tried all of the following, but none of them worked:

//Effort 1
$resolution = trim($resolution);

//Effort 2
$resolution = nl2br($resolution);

//Effort 3
$resolution = htmlentities($resolution);

//Effort 4
$resolution = preg_replace("\\r\\n","<br>",$resolution);

I'm now at a complete loss. Can anyone shed some light on this?

I'm not sure, but it feels like this was answered over at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1011641/how-can-i-use-css-to-preserve-line-breaks-in-an-html-code-block -- basically: just let CSS deal with the newlines instead — Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans, Aug 20 '14 at 19:22
try putting the `` between `
` tags. If you store your data in a database you might want to put the insert between `
` tags aswell — SuperDJ, Aug 20 '14 at 19:22
@Mike'Pomax'Kamermans how then to remove the \r\n even if I could deal with it in CSS? — dihakz, Aug 20 '14 at 19:24
@SuperDJ If I had This is a
test. as my output, I could certainly try that. However, all I get is This is a\r\n\r\ntest. or (if using a couple of the efforts listed above, I get *nothing* — dihakz, Aug 20 '14 at 19:27
possible duplicate of [keep textarea input format after using mysql\_real\_escape\_string to store](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5968206/keep-textarea-input-format-after-using-mysql-real-escape-string-to-store) — Giorgos Tsakonas, Jul 04 '15 at 15:22

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 20 '14 at 19:27

3

Just use double quotes on str_replace

str_replace('\r',"\r",str_replace('\n',"\n",$resolution));

http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php

or if you're really dealing with double backslashes:

str_replace('\\\\r',"\r",str_replace('\\\\n',"\n",$resolution));

answered Aug 20 '14 at 19:27

albertdiones

735
5
10

2

Good answer, but use an array instead of two function calls. More efficient that way. – Machavity Aug 20 '14 at 19:28

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 20 '14 at 19:32

PHP has two different string building modes. The first uses single quotes, and will do absolutely no variable or special character substitutions. That's what you're using.

The second is variable-embedding in double quoted strings, which should work:

$text = str_replace("\\", "\", $text);
echo "<textarea>$text</textarea>";

The \r and \n should now be active carriage return and newline characters in your output, not the character "slash" and then an 'r' or 'n'

Converting \r\n to line breaks in a textarea (not using a tag) in PHP

2 Answers2

Converting \r\n to line breaks in a textarea (not using a
tag) in PHP