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 $text is the text you're talking about.
Nothing there is stripping line breaks.
It's more likely that you're not doing anything on the display side to make the line breaks display. You're outputting HTML, and to HTML a line break is just more whitespace. You'll probably benefit from applying nl2br().
Related
I went through similar questions on this issue but couldn't find a solution.
I have a simple textarea in which text will be pasted or entered directly.
How do I preserve those line breaks?
Right now line breaks will just be ignored, but when I print_r($_POST) and inspect the output in the Chrome Developer Console it still has the original text breaks.
How can I display those when showing the submitted data?
Right now line breaks will just be ignored
No, it is still there. The key you miss is that what you enter goes as ASCII code LF (0xA) but this makes no effect in HTML unless the text is displayed as preformatted block (<pre> ... </pre>). If not, then line break is represented bytag so what you need to do if you want to display entered text is to convertLFs to(you can usenl2br()function to do that) or use` block.
You can use nl2br() function:
Inserts HTML line breaks before all newlines in a string
echo(nl2br($_POST));
More information at http://php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php.
As Marcin noted, use nl2br() when displaying your data as instructed in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6480671/6206601
So, I have a taxtarea where the user makes a blog post but when the user submits it their line breaks get replaced with a 'rn' and I don't know why. I thought it was the php script but when I rewrote it and after taking away the str_replaces' it still replaced a new line with a rn.
What is happening?
In textarea just like any Text Editor, New Line are carriage (\r) or newline feed (\n) characters or combination of the two (depending on the OS). To convert these characters to linebreak of HTML, use the nl2br() of PHP.
Check PHP Manual for reference.
Try removing any stripslahes(). Stripslashes removes any backslashes and forward slashes. For example, line breaks are being sent as \n or \r and the stripslashes() takes away the backslashes in those, so that's why it says 'rn'.
I had this very problem, and this solution helped me. Good luck!
I've asked this question before but I didn't seem to get the right answer. I've got a problem with new lines in text. Javascript and jQuery don't like things like this:
alert('text
text);
When I pull information from a database table that has a break line in it, JS and jQuery can't parse it correctly. I've been told to use n2lbr(), but that doesn't work when someone uses 'shift+enter' or 'enter' when typing text into a message (which is where I get this problem). I still end up with separate lines when using it. It seems to correctly apply the BR tag after the line break, but it still leaves the break there.
Can anyone provide some help here? I get the message data with jQuery and send it off to PHP file to storage, so I'd like to fix the problem there.
This wouldn't be a problem normally, but I want to pull all of a users messages when they first load up their inbox and then display it to them via jQuery when they select a certain message.
You could use a regexp to replace newlines with spaces:
alert('<?php preg_replace("/[\n\r\f]+/m","<br />", $text); ?>');
The m modifier will match across newlines, which in this case I think is important.
edit: sorry, didn't realise you actually wanted <br /> elements, not spaces. updated answer accordingly.
edit2: like #LainIwakura, I made a mistake in my regexp, partly due to the previous edit. my new regexp only replaces CR/NL/LF characters, not any whitespace character (\s). note there are a bunch of unicode linebreak characters that i haven't acknowledged... if you need to deal with these, you might want to read up on the regexp syntax for unicode
Edit: Okay after much tripping over myself I believe you want this:
$str = preg_replace('/\n+/', '<br />', $str);
And with that I'm going to bed...too late to be answering questions.
I usually use json_encode() to format string for use in JavaScript, as it does everything that's necessary for making JS-valid value.
I'm having problems sending HTML emails with long lines of text. The WYSIWYG editor (FCKEditor 2.5) used on the site keeps removing all the \n characters on certain browsers, including IE and Chrome. The result is an email with a single huge line of text. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for email clients that wrap lines of over 998 characters by inserting ! \n in it. Of course, these almost always end up in the most unfortunate places, breaking HTML tags and looking nasty in the content itself.
My initial solution was to add a line feed after every HTML tag or every 900 to 990 characters. This is the regex I ended up with:
return preg_replace("/(<\/[^\>]+>|<[^\>]+\/>|>[^<]{900,990}\s)(\n)*/","$1\n",$str);
However, when there are lines that don't contain any tags at all, the whitespace matching part is never triggered. But if I remove the > from it's beginning, it starts breaking tags.
Is there a better way than regex to do this, or can this regex be healed?
EDIT: The 1000 character line length limit is defined in RFC 821.
Following my comment, I'm posting this as I have been able to run a test.
tidy::repairString shoud do the job just fine, better than any regex solution.
$content = "<html>......</html>";
$oTidy = new tidy();
$content = $oTidy->repairString($content,
array("show-errors" => 0, "show-warnings" => false),
"utf8"
);
Adapt the Charset parameter (3rd) to your needs.
The clean option is unneeded for this, I was wrong in my comment.
If I understand everything correctly, you don't need to concern yourself with lines that don't contain HTML at all - these can be left to be handled by email clients.
I'm using PHP to create some basic HTML. The tags are always the same, but the actual links/titles correspond to PHP variables:
$string = '<p style="..."><strong><i>'.$title[$i].'</i></strong>
<br>';
echo $string;
fwrite($outfile, $string);
The resultant html, both as echoed (when I view the page source) and in the simple txt file I'm writing to, reads as follows:
<p style="..."><a href="http://www.example.com
"><strong><i>Example Title
</i></strong></a></p>
<br>
While this works, it's not exactly what I want. It looks like PHP is adding a line break every time I interrupt the string to insert a variable. Is there a way to prevent this behavior?
Whilst it won't affect your HTML page at all with the line breaks (unless you are using pre or text-wrap: pre), you should be able to call trim() on those variables to remove newlines.
To find out if your variable has a newline at front or back, try this regex
var_dump(preg_match('/^\n|\n$/', $variable));
(I think you have to use single quotes so PHP doesn't turn your \n into a literal newline in the string).
My guess is your variables are to blame. You might try cleaning them up with trim: http://us2.php.net/trim.
The line breaks show up because of multi-byte encoding, I believe. Try:
$newstring = mb_substr($string_w_line_break,[start],[length],'UTF-8');
That worked for me when strange line breaks showed up after parsing html.