Keep Line Breaks from Textarea

Question

I am getting input from a user in a form via PHP in a WordPress site (an address specifically) and I want to be able to display the information that I gather with the same line breaks (separating out the different components of the address) on a different page. It displays correctly if I put it into a textarea, but if I get the data and echo it into a div by itself, it doesn't maintain the line breaks. What can I do?

Solution 1

you want to utilize the white-space css attribute http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_white-space.asp

So you'll have something like

<p class="whitespace"><?= $input_from_textarea ?></p>

with css:

.whitespace { 
    white-space: pre-wrap; 
}

Do not manually clean your input replacing new line elements with break tags. It makes your data less reusable and is a lot more work.

You can use the php function nl2br() but it does not give you as much control as manipulating the display through css.

Solution 2

You can use echo nl2br( $string) to convert \n to <br> HTML line break.

Solution 3

HTML collapses any amount of whitespace (except non breaking space) including new lines to a single space. In order to maintain new lines, you will need to replace new lines with <br> or use <pre> tags or use one of the white-space CSS rules designed to control this behaviour.

Solution 4

use nl2br() method to ratain your . nl2br($text); for more quires check this http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php

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Comments

[Charles Ouellet]

This answer should be accepted!