explode textarea php (at new lines)

Question

can I do:

explode(\"\\n\", $_POST[\'thetextarea\']);

and have it work on all platforms? (The question I am asking is will it ever be \\r\\n

Answer 1

You should use:

explode("\r\n", $_POST['thetextarea']);

It will always be the same.

Browsers and other user-agents will make sure they are :-)

See http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_8.html#SEC8.2.1 for more info.

Answer 2

You can do something like this:

$text = trim($_POST['textareaname']);
$text = nl2br($text);

Answer 3

You could also use the PHP_EOL constant:

explode(PHP_EOL, $_POST['thetextarea']);

Answer 4

This will do the trick given \r\n, \r or \n:

preg_split('/\r\n|[\r\n]/', $_POST['thetextarea'])