Re: Formatting Question

On Mon, October 2, 2006 12:08 pm, Toby Osbourn wrote: > Sorry to plague you with a question that should have a simple answer, > but I > can't find said answer anywhere (probably looking for the wrong things > in > the wrong places!) > > Basically I want to allow a user to input a string via a form into a > database, I have the code to do that and it works almost 100% - I have > made > it so that any html tags are stripping off the string before saving > it, but > I do want to allow some basic formatting - namely when a user takes a > new > line in the textbox, I want the new line to carry over to the > database. > > At the moment the user could type in something like this... > > wibble > wobble > > But after it has been submitted and then retrieved from the database > it will > return wibblewobble. You may THINK you are seeing "wibble wobble" in your browser, but that's because a browser smushes all whitespace into just one whitespace -- that's why you need &nbsp; all over the place in the Bad Old Days... :-) Anyway, you could be managing to strip out the newlines, I suppose, in which case you have to figure out where you are doing that. Echo out the data as it travels into/through/out-of your system. echo "<pre>"; htmlentities($whatever); "</pre>"; For removing the HTML, use http://php.net/striptags For ancient browsers that give non-standard newlines do like this with the input: $text = str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $text); //non-standard Windows browsers $text = str_replace("\r", "\n", $text); //non-standard Mac browsers Then, on *OUTPUT* to a browser, only on output to a browser, you can use http://php.net/nl2br to format the newlines for HTML. The reason for doing this only on output is this: Some day, even if you don't think you will, you *might* need to output this to someting other than a browser. RSS, CSV dump, or some new fancy format we haven't even invented yet. Don't "pollute" your raw data (the newlines) with a very media-specific formatting code ("<br />") -- Keep your raw data pure and clean, and format for the destination when you send it there, not when you store it. There *might* be some egregious examples of over-loaded high-volume servers where adding the "<br />" at run-time is "too much work" -- At that point, it's probably still not the "Right Answer" to pollute the raw data. It might be expensive, but adding a cache of the output data, or even a second field for data_as_html to the database should be considered. Anything other than polluting your raw data. This may seem high-falutin' purism, but it will make your life sooooo much more pleasant some day down the road. -- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some starving artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So?