"replace newline" seems to be a question asked here and there like hundred times already. But however, i haven't found any working solution for myself yet.
I have a textarea that i use to save data into DB. Then using AJAX I want to get data from the DB in the backend that is in TEXT field and to pass it to frontend using JSON. But pasing JSON returns an error, as new lines from DB are not valid JSON syntax, I guess i should use \n instead...
But how do i replace newlinew from DB with \n?
I've tried this
$t = str_replace('<br />', '\n', nl2br($t));
and this
$t = preg_replace("/\r\n|\n\r|\r|\n/", "\n", $t);
and using CHAR(13) and CHAR(10), and still I get an error
the new line in textarea is equivalent to, i guess
$t = 'text with a
newline';
it gives the same error. And in notepad i clearly see that it is crlf
You need to escape all the characters that have a special meaning in JSON, not only line feeds. And you also need to convert to UTF-8.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel, json_encode() can do everything for you.
Prfff... >_< silly me
I've lost another slash before replacing with \n
$t = preg_replace("/\r\n|\n\r|\r|\n/", "\\n", $t);
Related
Currently I have the following strings.
$artist = 'Lookas';
$song = 'Can't Get Enough';
As you can see above, the $song portion contains random text appose to just placing a symbol which should look like this ', how can I solve this?
The title also returns this some times as well.. & appose to returning the proper & symbol.
Those are not "random" characters. It is a html number encoded apostrophe.
<?php
$song = 'Can't Get Enough';
var_dump(mb_convert_encoding($song, 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES'));
The output obviously is:
string(16) "Can't Get Enough"
As mentioned in the comment by #Memor-X, those are HTML-entities.
If this is data that you're getting from your own database, then you're using htmlspecialchars() in the wrong place. If not, then I recommend reading up on what that function does, and you'll find out how to decode those entities.
This is probably really stupid, but I try to save content from a texarea into MySQL with PHP. Normally newlines are preserved in the database. But suddenly they are removed.
I use jquery to send the values to PHP with ajax, and then I do this in PHP:
$var = strip_tags( $_POST["var"] );
$db->query("UPDATE table SET var='$var' WHERE id=$id")
Somehow newlines are lost on the way in. If I do nl2br on the var, then they are translated to <br/>, so $var contains newline right up until I run the query.
Update, to add to the strangeness. If I actually run nl2br on $var, and then replace br-tags with newline, before updating the table, all is well, what is going on?!?
This is working just fine:
$var = strip_tags( $_POST["var"] );
$var = nl2br($var);
$var = preg_replace('#<br\s*/?>#i', "\n", $var);
$db->query("UPDATE table SET var='$var' WHERE id=$id");
I've had another look into the Zebra (source code this time), and as mentioned in previous comment this is exactly why newlines get removed. The escape method from Zebra package uses:
http://php.net/manual/en/mysqli.real-escape-string.php
which means the following are removed:
NUL (ASCII 0), \n, \r, \, ', ", and Control-Z.
You could try to add the input in:
<pre></pre>
This will save your input as preformatted text in the database.
Reference: https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/pre
nl2br is a good solution too, use whichever you prefer.
Also make sure you are using the right configuration for your database column. It should be VARCHAR or TEXT.
I think your problem is that newlines get removed before being passed to the server.
You mentioned it's being sent with jQuery so make sure there isn't any client-side processing before being sent to the server.
I have a textarea in my html for user to input some text. I can get it to save into mysql table field with text attribute using php. Before insert into mysql, I will mysql_real_escape_string($data);(for security reason). But when I retrieve it back out from database, I will get
{"bittext":"i
love
mcD"}
With that I will get error:
Error: JSON Parse error: Unterminated string
parse#[native code]
I am not sure how I can reformat it back so that I can parse it to JSON.
Update:
I found out that I did not add json_encode($data) function. Now I can turn
{"bittext":"i
love
mcD"}
into
{"bittext":"i\nlove\nmcD"}
But I am having problem to convert \n to \\n using $data = str_replace(array('\r\n', '\r', '\n'),'\\n', $data);. For some reason \\n is not working. Is there other way to do this?
Update2:
After much of messing around with the code, I finally got it to work:
$je = json_encode($rs,JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
$nl = array('\r\n', '\r', '\n');
$je = str_replace($nl,'\\n', $je);
My initial issue is when I log it with firephpcore, I can only see \n even after str_replace($nl,'\\n', $je). But as I do more test and found out it actually already work even though it did not display well in console.
From the documentation for mysql_real_escape_string();
mysql_real_escape_string() calls MySQL's library function
mysql_real_escape_string, which prepends backslashes to the following
characters: \x00, \n, \r, \, ', " and \x1a.
Your insert statement will inculde the string '{"bittext":"i \\nlove \\nmcD"}' - notice we are escaping the escape character here, which is what mysql_real_escape_string() does.
Which will insert into your table the string '{"bittext":"i \nlove \nmcD"}' - this is what you should see if you do a select from the mysql client.
Somewhere, either pre-insert, or post-select your code is processing the value and changing '\n', to an actual newline byte, instead of leaving it as the string '\n'.
You could patch this by running;
$data = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n"), "\\n", $data);
However, I would recommend you track back through your code to see where in your pipeline escaped strings are getting converted to actuals.
I've tried about everything to delete some extra \n characters in a web application I'm working with. I was hoping someone has encountered this issue before and knows what can be causing this. All my JS and PHP files are UTF-8 encoded with no BOM.
And yes I've tried things like
In JS:
text.replace(/\n/g,"")
In PHP:
preg_replace("[\n]","",$result);
str_replace("\n","",$result);
and when I try
text.replace(/\n/g,"")
in the firebug console using the same string I get from the server it works but for reason it doesn't work in a JS file.
I'm desperate, picky and this is killing me. Any input is appreciated.
EDIT:
If it helps, I know how to use the replace functions above. I'm able to replace any other string or pattern except \n for some reason.
Answer Explanation:
Some people do and use what works because it just works. If you are like me and for the record I always like to know why what works WORKS!
In my case:
Why this works? str_replace('\n', '', $result)
And this doesn't? str_replace("\n", '', $result)
Looks identical right?
Well it seems that when you enclose a string with a character value like \n in double quotes "\n" it's seen as it's character value NOT as a string. On the other hand if you enclose it in single quotes '\n' it's really seen as the string \n. At least that is what i concluded in my 3 hours headache.
If what I concluded is a setup specific issue OR is erroneous please do let me know or edit.
In php, use str_replace(array('\r','\n'), '', $string).
I guess the problem is you also have \r's in your code (carriage returns, also displayed as newlines).
In javascript, the .replace() method doesn't modify the string. It returns a new modified string, so you need to reference the result.
text = text.replace(/\n/g,"")
Both of the PHP functions you tried return the altered string, they do not alter their arguments:
$result = preg_replace("[\n]","",$result);
$result = str_replace("\n","",$result);
Strangely, using
str_replace(array('\r','\n'), '', $string)
didn't work for me. I can't really work out why either.
In my situation I needed to take output from the a WordPress custom meta field, and then I was placing that formatted as HTML in a javascript array for later use as info windows in a Google Maps instance on my site.
If I did the following:
$stockist_address = $stockist_post_custom['stockist_address'][0];
$stockist_address = apply_filters( 'the_content', $stockist_address);
$stockist_sites_html .= str_replace(array('\r','\n'), '', $stockist_address);
This did not give me a string with the html on a single line. This therefore threw an error on Google Maps.
What I needed to do instead was:
$stockist_address = $stockist_post_custom['stockist_address'][0];
$stockist_address = apply_filters( 'the_content', $stockist_address);
$stockist_sites_html .= trim( preg_replace( '/\s+/', ' ', $stockist_address ) );
This worked like a charm for me.
I believe that usage of \s in regular expressions tabs, line breaks and carriage returns.
I'm using str_replace and it's not working correctly.
I have a text area, which input is sent with a form. When the data is received by the server, I want to change the new lines to ",".
$teams = $_GET["teams"];
$teams = str_replace("\n",",",$teams);
echo $teams;
Strangely, I receive the following result
Chelsea
,real
,Barcelona
instead of Chealsea,real,Barcelona.
What's wrong?
To expand on Waage's response, you could use an array to replace both sets of characters
$teams = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\n"),",",$teams);
echo $teams;
This should handle both items properly, as a single \n is valid and would not get caught if you were just replacing \r\n
Try replacing "\r\n" instead of just "\n"
I would trim the text and replace all consecutive CR/LF characters with a comma:
$text = preg_replace('/[\r\n]+/', ',', trim($text))
I had the same issue but found a different answer so thought I would share in case it helps someone.
The problem I had was that I wanted to replace \n with <br/> for printing in HTML. The simple change I had to make was to escape the backslash in str_replace("\n","<br>",($text)) like this:
str_replace("\\n","<br>",($text))