I'm having trouble getting data out of the database and echoing out in a HTML page textarea.
This is the code used to get the data into the database:
$_SESSION['content'] = mysqli_real_escape_string($link, strip_tags($_POST['content'],'<a>'));
This simply strips HTML tags except for links and stores in the database. If you look in the database, the line breaks are invisible but there, so i assume they are \n and \r.
If i were to type into a textarea:
This should be a
New line
The database stores this as:
This should be a<br>
New line
When echoed out into a textarea, this is what's displayed:
This should be a \r\n\r\nNew line
I'm sure i'm missing something very simple, any help greatly appreciated.
UPDATE:
If i remove mysqli_real_escape_string, the line breaks are preserved and work perfectly, do I have to sacrifice security for this?
SOLVED:
mysqli_real_escape_string causing the problem, do not echo out a variable which has had this applied. Only use mysqli_real_escape_string when inserting, deleting, etc from a database, not before, definitely not after ;)
Thanks everyone!
Use the correct HTML/CSS.
;-)
The line breaks all work in an HTML pre tag, or in a tag with the CSS white-space property set to:
white-space: pre;
Resources:
http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_white-space.asp
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/whitespace.html
Firstly, you shouldn't be using nl2br as this will change your \n's to <br>'s.
You will most likely need to strip the slashes echo stripslashes($_SESSION['content']).
Edit following further comments:
If the data is stored as <br>'s in the database, you can just do str_replace('<br>',"\n",$string); which will convert the <br>'s into \n's
This worked for me:
function br2nl( $input ) {
return preg_replace( '/\<br.*\>/Ui', '', $input );
}
For very long lines, you also need the text to wrap instead of potentially break out of its parent container. To cover this case, but also preserve new lines, use following css:
white-space: pre-wrap;
resource: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/w/whitespace/
The nl2br function is working with that content as a string:
http://codepad.org/M2Jw9KQJ
This leads me to believe that you are not echoing out the content you claim you are.
Are you sure the content in the DB is as you say it is?
Perhaps you need to go the other way round:
function br2nl( $data ) {return preg_replace( "!<br.*>!iU", "\n", $data );}
Related
I made a board where users can write and post things, and in my board_insert.php file, I have
$content=preg_replace("/(\r\n || \n\r)/","<br>",$content);
in my mysql database, because of all the spaces, the table is very hard to read.
so I want to replace all the spaces in content column to <br>. I put both \r\n or \n\r because I didnt know which one meant 'space'.
Is there a better way to do this?
maybe not show the content part in mysql at all?
because it is not necessary for me to see content part in mysql when I can see it on the board_read page...
Thank you in advance!
Try this
$content=preg_replace("/\r?\n/","<br>",$content);
That said, you may be better of using another method then editing the data,
This is one way http://docs.php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php
using a <pre></pre> tag is another less invasive one. and the best is simple
<div style="white-space: pre"> content </div>
You can use
$content = str_replace(array("\n","\r"), "", nl2br($content));
Normally you would insert the data as is into the database, meaning with the \n and/or \r. When you display you can use nl2br() to display it as HTML.
I have text area and when the user submit the form I save the data into my db
in db the line breaks work excellently but when displaying them back with echo the line breaks disappear :(
I check all things and removed all validation functions like strip_tags and so on just printed it pure from db but the same thing so can anyone tell me what went wrong ?
thnx in advance
Line breaks in textarea is \r\n while for browsers it's just white-space. You need to replace them with <br /> tag. php took care of it and you have nl2br function for that:
echo nl2br($stringFromDB);
Note: when you output user-input always escape it at first. So basically you should be doing:
// Chaining functions like this is bad. Avoid in real world apps.
echo nl2br(htmlspecialchars($stringFromDB, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
I have a text field that inserts its content into an SQL table. Often, I will want this content to have <p> html tags within, based on line breaks in the text field. I have tried doing a replace before inserting:
str_replace("</p><p>", "\n", $_POST["body"]);
and I have tried doing a replace with escape characters:
str_replace("</p><p>", "\n", $_POST["body"]);
with no success. Meaning they still appear as text field line breaks. There is no security issue as the field can only be accessed by an administrator. Thank you for your help.
it seems both times you are trying to replace contrary - a </p><p> to \n which obviously fails
try to swap str_replace argumants.
I don't understand what SQL has to do here though
How about replacing each separately?
str_replace(array("</p>", "<p>"), array("\n","\n"), $_POST["body"]);
I think the problem is in " latter, like google, try replacing it with ' or call function addslashes() on your text.
I have a text area in HTML where the user can enter text, but when the form is submitted, and its passed to a php script which echo's it, there aren't any newlines. Knowing that HTML does that, I tried doing a preg_replace() before echoing it...
echo preg_replace("/\n/", "<br />", $_GET["text"]);
but still everything is on one line.
So my best guess is that HTML textareas use a different newline character... can anybody shed some light on the subject?
EDIT
Ok, so I've figured out the problem: The Javascript is stripping the newlines. view code here
EDIT 2
Ok, so thanks to Jason for solving this problem. I needed to do:
escape(document.getElementById('text'));
Instead of just:
document.getElementById('text');
and the newlines are preserved, problem solved!
echo nl2br($_GET['text'])
Though, your preg_replace worked for me!
usually when testing for newlines in any string, I use /[\n\r]/, just to cover my bases. My guess is that this would match the new lines.
I use a php form processor script that works fine. Except when users submit text in a multi-line text field, any line breaks or new lines are stripped out of the resulting string variable that is passed on. This often makes it unreadable by whoever receives the form results.
I'm no php expert but am sure the answer lies in the code that is stripping characters. What I'm unsure of is if I stop it stripping characters will this result in a security risk?
The strip array reads:
array('*', '|', '>', '<', '/', '\\\', '\"', 'Bcc', 'BCC', 'bcc');
What can I change here to retain the line breaks?
Thanks in advance for any help.
If your problem is with the submitted string then this means that the submitted string did not contain any line breaks or newline chars.
In one occassion i looked up the wrap="(hard|physical)" attribute on the text area. Some values of this attribute force the textarea to maintain line-breaks in the user text.
Did you try using nl2br($text) on the submitted text;
I believe you have an issue at the rendering phase. Have you tried:
echo nl2br($text);
Where $text is the text you're talking about.
Nothing there is stripping line breaks.
It's more likely that you're not doing anything on the display side to make the line breaks display. You're outputting HTML, and to HTML a line break is just more whitespace. You'll probably benefit from applying nl2br().