How to use substr but keep
in textarea

Question

So I've created a post function, but when I want to display the post on the front page, it should only show the first 200 letters as well as keeping all breaks the user made in the textarea. What I am doing is the following:

substr($row["content"], 0, 200);

and this displays the content just fine, but it lets out all breaks that the user makes.

Do you mean new lines aren't there or `
` was removed from the content?.. or were/are there `
` after the first 200 characters you want? — chris85, Sep 03 '16 at 17:03
@Danuel Alsaker can you give the contents of $row["content"] or at least an example — Abishek V Ashok, Sep 03 '16 at 17:04

pedrouan · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-03T17:20:00.293

2

Apply newline to break function to your substring:

nl2br(substr($row["content"], 0, 200));

Or if you want to save whole words:

nl2br(mb_substr($row["content],0,200)); //this will not strip the word in the middle, so if it longer than 200 with the last word, it ends up before that word

edited Sep 03 '16 at 17:20

answered Sep 03 '16 at 17:13

pedrouan

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This is just what I was looking for! Was exactly thinking about if there was a way to combine nl2br with substr as I've used them seperated from each other, was just not sure of how to combine them. Thank you C: – Daniel Alsaker Sep 05 '16 at 07:58

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

0

take a look here

How to get correctly content and avoid breaking html tags using strip_tags with substr?

edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

Community

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answered Sep 03 '16 at 17:07

Reuben Gomes

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9
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But that's why you should substring string first, and THEN to apply nl2br. – pedrouan Sep 03 '16 at 17:18

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

PHP's End Of Line

The correct 'End Of Line' symbol for PHP is the PHP_EOL constant. You can use PHP_EOL constant to replace the newline character in a cross-platform-compatible way with the br tag.

$row["content"] = str_replace(PHP_EOL,'<br>',$row["content"]);

Take a look at strip_tags

Strip_tags will remove all HTML,XML and PHP tags from a string. You can use the optional second parameter as a whitelist.

Keeping the BR tag

Use strip_tags with whitelisting br and substr in one line:

substr(strip_tags($row["content"],'<br>'), 0, 200);

Final code

Let's combine the replace and filter steps in one code block.

substr(strip_tags(str_replace(PHP_EOL,'<br>',$row["content"]),'<br>'), 0, 200);

How to use substr but keep in textarea

3 Answers3

How to use substr but keep
in textarea