line breaks showing up as \r\n in textarea - php

I am trying to display a data into textarea which is fetched from tables that i have submitted via another form. The issue comes up when a new line is entered.
The data getting displayed in the textarea is as
lin1\r\nlin2
it should be like
lin1
lin2
I have tried nl2br but it does not work as expected.
How can i make things optimized. Thanks

This problem can be solved using stripcslashes() when outputting your data.
Please note that the method above is different from stripslashes() which doesn't work in this case.
I tried using nl2br but it wasn't sufficient either.

I hope str_replace saves you.
<?php
$str='lin1\r\nlin2';
$str=str_replace('\r\n','<br>',$str);
echo $str;
OUTPUT:
lin1
lin2

This is a common question and the most common answers are ln2br or str_replace.
However this is just creating unnecessary code.
In reality the problem is pretty much always that you have run the data through a mysql escape function before displaying it. Probably while you were in the process of saving it. Instead, escape the data for saving but display an unescaped version.

<?php echo str_replace('\r\n', "\r\n", $text_with_line_breaks); ?>
See single quotes & double quotes this is a trick.
A perfect solution for newbies.

you overdo quote in insert/update statement
This problem in you case you can solve doing next
<?php
$str = 'lin1\r\nlin2';
$solved_str = str_replace(array("\\r","\\n"), array("\r","\n"), $str);
var_dump($str,$solved_str);
But you need to check insert/update statement on over quotation escape symbols

I would recommend using double quotes for \r\n such as "\r\n". I've never had it work properly with single quotes.

For non- textarea use this function
function escapeNonTextarea($string){
$string=str_replace(array('\n','\r\n','\r'),array("<br>","<br","<br>"),$string);
return $string;
}
For text area use this function
function escapeTextarea($string){
$string=str_replace(array('\n','\r\n','\r'),array("\n","\r\n","\r"),$string);
return $string;
}
call appropriate function and pass argument

Related

Unexpected characters from escaping apostrophes

I created a form that takes a block of text and inserts it into an SQL database. I kept getting SQL errors when the user used single quotes. I added the addslashes() function and everything worked out fine. But according to w3, php should already be doing this. Further, when I retrieve the text from the database, all the apostrophes are replaced with � character.
Does anyone know what's happening? I don't even know where to begin.
Use these functions to insert data in db or out from db
These will solve the problem of single quote or double quotes and all special charters.
function DBin($string)
{
return trim(htmlspecialchars($string,ENT_QUOTES));
}
function DBout($string)
{
$string = trim($string);
return htmlspecialchars_decode($string,ENT_QUOTES);
}
Thanks everyone.
mysql_escape_string() worked. For the record, addslashes() was turning apostrophes into backticks. The problem

Escape quote or special characters in array value

In my PHP code, I'm setting up an area for people to enter their own info to be displayed. The info is stored in an array and I want to make it as flexible as possible.
If I have something like...
$myArray[]['Text'] = 'Don't want this to fail';
or
$myArray[]['Text'] = "This has to be "easy" to do";
How would I go about escaping the apostrophe or quote within the array value?
Thanks
Edit: Since there is only a one to one relationship, I changed my array to this structure...
$linksArray['Link Name'] ='/path/to/link';
$linksArray['Link Name2'] ='/path/to/link2';
$linksArray['Link Name2'] ='/path/to/link3';
The plan is I set up a template with an include file that has these links in a format someone else (a less technical person) can maintain. They will have direct access to the PHP and I'm afraid they may put a single or double quote in the "link name" area and break the system.
Thanks again.
POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
Thanks #Tim Cooper.
Here's a sample that worked for me...
$link = "http://www.google.com";
$text = <<<TEXT
Don't you loving "googling" things
TEXT;
$linksArray[$text] = $link;
Using a heredoc might be a good solution:
$myArray[]['Text'] = <<<TEXT
Place text here without escaping " or '
TEXT;
PHP will process these strings properly upon input.
If you are constructing the strings yourself as you have shown, you can alternate between quotation styles (single and double)...as in:
$myArray[]['Text'] = "Don't want this to fail";
$myArray[]['Text'] = 'This has to be "easy" to do';
Or, if you must escape the characters, you use the \ character before the quotation.
$myArray[]['Text'] = 'Don\'t want this to fail';
$myArray[]['Text'] = "This has to be \"easy\" to do";
If you really want to make i easy, use a separate configuration file in either INI or XML style. INI is usually the easiest for people to edit manually. XML is good if you have a really nested structure.
Unless you are letting users enter direct PHP code (you probably aren't), you don't have to worry about what they enter until you go to display it. When you actually display the info they enter, you will want to sanitize it using something like htmlentities().
Edit: I realize I may be misunderstanding your question. If so, ignore this! :)
You can use the addslashes($str) function to automatically escape quotes.
You can also try htmlentities, which will encode quotes and other special values into HTML entities: http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php

Getting rid of \r\n strings

I have a form into which I entered a newline character which looked correct when I entered it, but when the data is now pulled from the database, instead of the white space, I get the \n\r string showing up.
I try to do this:
$hike_description = nl2br($hike_description);
But it doesn't work. Does anyone know how this can be fixed? I am using PHP.
And here is the page where this is happening. See the description section of the page:
http://www.comehike.com/hikes/scheduled_hike.php?hike_id=130
Thanks,
Alex
Does anyone know how this can be fixed?
Sure.
Your code doing unnecessary escaping, most likely before adding text to the database.
So, instead of replacing it back, you have to find that harmful code and get rid of it.
This means, you have probably plain text '\n\r' strings in the db.
Try to sanitize db output before display:
$sanitized_text = preg_replace('/\\[rn]/','', $text_from_db);
(just a guess).
Addendum:
Of course, as Col. Shrapnel pointed out, there's something fundamentally wrong
with the contents of the database (or, it is used this way by convention and you don't know that).
For now, you have fixed a symptom partially
but it would be much better to look for the reason for these escaped characters
being in the database at all.
Regards
rbo
You can use str_replace to clean up the input.
$hike_description = nl2br(str_replace("\r\n", "\n", $hike_description));
$hike_description = str_replace(array('\n','\r'),'',$hike_description);
You may want to read up on the differences between the single quote and double quote in PHP as well: http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php

nl2br not working for me

I can't get nl2br function to work after fetching data from my database:
$result = mysql_query("SELECT comments..etc.etc..");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo nl2br($row["comments"]);
}
In database row comments:
\r\nThanks,\r\n
OUTPUT:
Same as in DB:
\r\nThanks,\r\n
If I simply test this out like so it works fine:
<?php
$mystring = "\r\nThanks,\r\n";
echo nl2br($mystring);
?>
OUTPUT:
converts \r \n to <br />
try this:
echo preg_replace('/\v+|\\\r\\\n/Ui','<br/>',$row["comments"]);
I know this is an old post but if like me you are have stumbled across this issue and the above didn't work for you, this solution may help you instead:
echo nl2br(stripslashes($row["comments"]));
or (they are not the same function, note the additional "c" after strip)
echo nl2br(stripcslashes($row["comments"]));
See original thread that helped me: nl2br() not working when displaying SQL results
Most likely you are doing escaping twice, when adding your data into DB.
Check your code that adds data to DB and remove unnecessary escaping.
Most likely it's some senseless "universal sanitization" function.
Well it's easy.
Let's take a quote, not a newline to demonstrate. The behavior the same.
Slashes being stripped then data goes to database.
Thus, in the normal case:
source: It's
after escaping: It\'s
by the query execution slash being stripped and
both in the database and back It's
in double escaping case:
source: It's
after escaping: It\'s
after second escaping: It\\\'s
by the query execution slash being stripped and
both in the database and back It\'s
we have our data spoiled.
Just make yourself understand that escaping i not something magical that makes your data "safe" (and, therefore can be done many times, as you probably think). It's just adding a backslash to certain symbols.
My guess is that the slashes in your DB are literal slashes (followed by n or r), not newlines. Can you find a way to store literal newlines in your database?
Following solution will work for both windows as well as for linux/unix machine
str_replace(array("\\r\\n", "\\r", "\\n"), "<br />", "string");
Make sure that you are not to using strings from file and/or set in single apostrophe. Because string is treated literally, and nl2br will not work.
NL2BR will work with double apostrophe.
Building on what Christian is saying, why don't you trying replacing the literal '\r\n' with "\r\n"?
Data you have stored is allready added the slashes.
You have to use stripslashes() first then str_replace()
stripslashes(str_replace('\r\n','<br/>',$row["comments"]))
For some reason this didn't work for me...
echo nl2br(stripcslashes($row["comments"]));
But this did...
$comments = stripcslashes($row["comments"]);
$commentsWithBreaks = nl2br($comments);
echo $commentsWithBreaks;
Not working for me either. I just did the following:
$mensaje = str_replace("
", "<br/>", $mensaje);
I was able to replace newline with <br> using this code :
str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n"), "<br>", "input");
(windows machine)
This could be a solution, at least it was for me.
$message = str_replace("\\r\\n", "<br>", $message);
It is possible that you are getting a string in which the slashes are escaped (i.e. \\) and nl2br works with \n\r not \\n\\r
Once you understand this, the solution is easy :)

Searching through a string trying to find ' in PHP

I am using tinyMCE and, rather annoyingly, it replaces all of my apostrophes with their HTML numeric equivalent. Now most of the time this isn't a problem but for some reason I am having a problem storing the apostrophe replacement. So i have to search through the string and replace them all. Any help would be much appreciated
did you try:
$string = str_replace("'", "<replacement>", $string);
Is it just apostrophes that you want decoded from HTML entities, or everything?
print html_entity_decode("Hello, that's an apostophe.", ENT_QUOTE);
will print
Hello, that's an apostrophe.
Why work around the problem when you can fix the cause? You can just turn of the TinyMCE entity encoding*. More info: here
*Unless you want all the other characters encoded, that is.

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