How to preserve line breaks in textarea?

Question

I went through similar questions on this issue but couldn't find a solution. I have a simple textarea in which text will be pasted or entered directly.

How do I preserve those line breaks?

Right now line breaks will just be ignored, but when I print_r($_POST) and inspect the output in the Chrome Developer Console it still has the original text breaks. How can I display those when showing the submitted data?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 22 '16 at 15:04

Right now line breaks will just be ignored

No, it is still there. The key you miss is that what you enter goes as ASCII code LF (0xA) but this makes no effect in HTML unless the text is displayed as preformatted block (<pre> ... </pre>). If not, then line break is represented by
tag so what you need to do if you want to display entered text is to convertLFs to
(you can usenl2br()function to do that) or use` block.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

1

As Marcin noted, use nl2br() when displaying your data as instructed in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6480671/6206601

edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

Community

1
1

answered Apr 22 '16 at 15:06

nbarbosa

1,652
1
12
10

1

An example - much better answer. – cssyphus Apr 22 '16 at 15:08

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 22 '16 at 15:08

1

You can use nl2br() function:

Inserts HTML line breaks before all newlines in a string

echo(nl2br($_POST));

More information at http://php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php.

answered Apr 22 '16 at 15:08

Panda

6,955
6
40
55

How to preserve line breaks in textarea?

3 Answers3