Re: escape \n

From: Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:05:18 +0000
Subject: Re: escape \n
References: 1  Groups: php.general 
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On Fri, 2010-04-23 at 09:51 +0200, Nick Balestra wrote: > Hello guys i am trying to figure out what is worng with thoose special escaped character, like > \n \t \r ... > > As i cannot make them working. The browser doesn't display them, but doesn't eithr > crate a new line, or else. > I am using them fro example like this: > > print: "this shoudl be on a line \nwhile this on a new line"; > > I've searched google and saw man people struggling with this, but apparently not a clear > answer to why....maybe is a stupid beginner question, but i would just like to know. (Personally i > solved for the moment by printing out <br> or <pre>, but i would like to understand > this. > > Cheers, Nick By default, PHP sends out HTML headers. Browsers ignore extraneous white-space characters, and also new lines, carriage returns and tabs, converting them all to a single space character. If you view the source in your browser, you'll see the newlines, but in regular display, your text is treated as HTML. There is a function in PHP called nl2br, which accepts a string and returns the same one with all the newlines replaced with <br> automatically, which might be easier to use if your content is in a string. Otherwise, the only way to get new lines on your actual page is to either manually use <br> tags, put the text inside a <pre> block, or use CSS to preserve the white-space. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk

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