line breaks in a textarea

Question

I know when saving a textarea you can use the nl2br() or str_replace to change the /n to br tags etc. However what im not sure about how to insert line breaks into a textare

Answer 1

From PHP using single quotes for the line break worked for me to support the line breaks when I pass that var to an HTML text area value attribute

PHP

foreach ($videoUrls as $key => $value) {
  $textAreaValue .= $value->video_url . '\n';
}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

HTML/JS

$( document ).ready(function() {
    var text = "<?= htmlspecialchars($textAreaValue); ?>";
    document.getElementById("video_urls_textarea").value = text;
});

Answer 2

<?php
$smarty = new Smarty;
$smarty->assign('test', "This is a \n Test");
$smarty->display('index.tpl');
?>

In index.tpl

{$test|nl2br}

In HTML

This is a<br />
test

Answer 3

Some wrong answers are posted here. instead of replacing \n to <br />, they are replacing <br /> to \n

So here is a good answer to store <br /> in your mysql when you entered in textarea:

str_replace("\n", '<br />',  $textarea);

Answer 4

What I found works in the form is str_replace('<br>', PHP_EOL, $textarea);

Answer 5

The simple way:

1. Use this to insert into mysql:

   $msg = $_GET['msgtextarea']; //or POST and my msg field format: text
   $msg = htmlspecialchars($msg, ENT_QUOTES);

2. And use this for output:

   echo nl2br($br['msg']);

Answer 6

You can use following code:

$course_description = nl2br($_POST["course_description"]);
$course_description = trim($course_description);