I insert questions(which might be a few paragraphs) in a sql table using php and than i diplay them on a webpage.
but when i display the question it loses its formatting. I mean it will just show the whole question in one paragraph, even thou there were many paragraphs before.
<td width=\"700px\" bgcolor=\"#EAD57F\"><font color=\"#4A2A0B\">Question :</font><font color=\"#5E450B\">".$row2['Question']."</font></td>
$row2['Question'] --> is my question that i am getting from my sql table by running the SELECT query.
So if i post something like :
a
s
d
f
into my input box.
the output looks like : asdf
How should i resolve this?
Best
Zeeshan
You probably save your paragraphs separated by a "new line" character. To translate that in HTML check the nl2br PHP function (in HTML new line is the <br /> tag).
Are you storing them as plain text, or do they contain HTML tags? If they are stored as plain text you should put them in a <pre> tag or something equivalent in order to preserve the spacing. Alternatively, you could do the encoding into HTML, putting in <p> tags and such where necessary, but that is complicated and easy to get wrong.
Related
Any ideas why formatted text from DB, when echo-ed out in php loses its formatting, i.e. no new lines? Thanks!
Use nl2br().
New lines are ignored by browser. That's why you see all text without line breaks. nl2br() converts new lines to <br /> tags that are displayed as new lines in browsers.
If you want to display your text in <textarea>, you don't need to convert all new lines to <br />. Anyway, if you do it... you will see "<br />"s as text in new lines places.
Because there are no html tags for formatting!
Try the nl2br function.
You could try add nl2br() function...
something like this: echo nl2br($your_text_variable);
It should work ;-)
The reason
This is the default behavior for all user agents. If you look at the page source, you'll see that your text has the same formatting like the one in the database (or textarea).
The reason of your confusion is probably that you once see the text in the <textarea> tag, which displays preformatted text, does not interpret the tags, and in the other case the text is interpreted (whitespace is not important in this case).
The browsers don't display new lines, unless specifically asked for - using <br> tag or any block level tags.
No tags == no new lines.
The fix
If you store preformatted text in the database,
you should wrap the output in the <pre> tag.
You may want to convert the formatting characters to the HTML tags you need using set of functions like nl2br, str_replace etc.
You may also correct your structure to store the HTML in the database instead of just plain text (however markup looks like a better solution).
See similar question:
How do I keep whitespace formatting using PHP/HTML?
The difference between the two images you show is that one has the text in a <textarea></textarea> and the other does not ... if you want 1:1: <textarea><?php echo $yourVariable;?></textarea>
It does output what you say to output. If the text is pre-formatted, put it inside the HTML <pre></pre> tag in your output script.
This should be helpful in answering.
How do I keep whitespace formatting using PHP/HTML?enter link description here
Set up a string preprocessing code for both input to database and output to display page
This qeustion seems simple but i loss lot of my time playing with it.
My requirement is simple i want a text area that supports line break i.e if a user enters(line break) and again types some text.When this value is stored in database and if i want to display that text on some page than it should exactly display with same formatting as entered.
Also the text area should support some special characters like this text mofrém.Here these characters are displayed as boxes.
Using tinymce is an option i guess, but is there any simpler solution? Can these text be manipulated using php?
Any help would be appreciated.
Found a similar question that has been answered:
Preserve Line Breaks From TextArea When Writing To MySQL
Posted by user Zuul
Two solutions for this:
PHP function nl2br():
e.g.,
echo nl2br("This\r\nis\n\ra\nstring\r");
// will output
This<br />
is<br />
a<br />
string<br />
Wrap the input in <pre></pre> tags.
See: W3C Wiki - HTML/Elements/pre
Edit:
In reply to comment. To store/encode special characters use:
nl2br(htmlspecialchars($text));
Then to decode again special characters:
htmlspecialchars_decode($text);
Reference:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars-decode.php
I am making a textarea, the value of which should be inserted into a database but the user input can contain new lines and the output should also contain new lines.
I use nl2br($message) to accomplish that but if the user inputs something like:
<ul>
<li>hi</li>
<li>nice to meet you</li>
<li>bye</li>
</ul>
it gives way too many spaces between each text because the <li> tag itself also contains some kind of break, so that means 2 breaks.
My question is: how can I avoid this, or which other function could I use to save the breaks of my user input?
if you are using textarea, it's better not to allow html tags to insert.. use php strip_tags() function for removing the html tags before inserting to database..
For my customer I wrote a custom web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor. It allows them to format basic HTML text and insert images. When they insert images I insert them with pattern like ##image1##. The produced HTML can be something like this:
<p>some text and some more text</p>
<p>some text and some <b>bold text</b></p>
<div>##image1##</div>
<p>more text can follow here</p>
<div>##image2##</div>
When outing this HTML I am searching trough it and replacing occurrences for images and replacing ##image1##, ##image2## and so on with HTML markup that actually display images. My replace code is here:
// first find all occurrences of image string
preg_match_all('|##(.+)##|', $inputHTML, $matches);
for every match in $inputHTML
$output = preg_replace('|##(.+)##|', $imageHTML, $inputHTML, 1 );
This will work mot of the times, but in some variations of input HTML will parse strange result. One of the HTML that produces strange result is:
<div>##image1##</div><p class="align-justify"><strong>Peter Dekleva</strong>, <strong>Damir Lisica</strong>, <strong>Anej Kočevar</strong> in <strong>Gregor Jakac</strong> so glasbeniki, ki v svoji glasbi združujejo silovite instrumentalne vložke, markantne melodije in močna besedila.</p><div>##image2##</div><p class="align-justify">Video dvojček skladbe Brez strahu torej prikazuje oblico sproščenih trenutkov iz zaodrja, veličasnih posnetkov s koncertnega dogajanja, priprav na nastope, nepredvidljive zaključke noči.</p>
If I edit that HTML and add a line brake before <div>##image2##</div> then it will parse it OK. Any idea what is happening here and why I have problems?
I am also opened to suggestions for a better way of doing this. I can insert something else instead ##image1## when inserting image in my WYSIWYG editor... Thanks
This is because the + modifier is greedy. So it will match everything until the last instance of ##. Try adding a ? after the + to change it to ungreedy.
|##(.+?)##|
The reason that a line break fixes the problem is because by default the . doesn't match line breaks. however if you had done instead: |##(.+)##|s the line break wouldn't have fixed the problem.
Edit I just noticed that churk's answer to your previous question would have also worked correctly.
you should create <img/> directly - but anyway, if you don't use # for your image names, use ^# instead of .
also if you are not sure that ## won't be used in other HTML, test for <div> too
<div>##(^#+)##</div>
Any ideas why formatted text from DB, when echo-ed out in php loses its formatting, i.e. no new lines? Thanks!
Use nl2br().
New lines are ignored by browser. That's why you see all text without line breaks. nl2br() converts new lines to <br /> tags that are displayed as new lines in browsers.
If you want to display your text in <textarea>, you don't need to convert all new lines to <br />. Anyway, if you do it... you will see "<br />"s as text in new lines places.
Because there are no html tags for formatting!
Try the nl2br function.
You could try add nl2br() function...
something like this: echo nl2br($your_text_variable);
It should work ;-)
The reason
This is the default behavior for all user agents. If you look at the page source, you'll see that your text has the same formatting like the one in the database (or textarea).
The reason of your confusion is probably that you once see the text in the <textarea> tag, which displays preformatted text, does not interpret the tags, and in the other case the text is interpreted (whitespace is not important in this case).
The browsers don't display new lines, unless specifically asked for - using <br> tag or any block level tags.
No tags == no new lines.
The fix
If you store preformatted text in the database,
you should wrap the output in the <pre> tag.
You may want to convert the formatting characters to the HTML tags you need using set of functions like nl2br, str_replace etc.
You may also correct your structure to store the HTML in the database instead of just plain text (however markup looks like a better solution).
See similar question:
How do I keep whitespace formatting using PHP/HTML?
The difference between the two images you show is that one has the text in a <textarea></textarea> and the other does not ... if you want 1:1: <textarea><?php echo $yourVariable;?></textarea>
It does output what you say to output. If the text is pre-formatted, put it inside the HTML <pre></pre> tag in your output script.
This should be helpful in answering.
How do I keep whitespace formatting using PHP/HTML?enter link description here
Set up a string preprocessing code for both input to database and output to display page