Elegant solution for line-breaks (PHP)

Question

$var = \"Hi there\".\"
\".\"Welcome to my website\".\"
;\"
echo $var;

Is there an elegant way to handle line-breaks in PHP? I\'

Answer 1

I ended up writing a function that has worked for me well so far:

// pretty print data
function out($data, $label = NULL) {

  $CLI = (php_sapi_name() === 'cli') ? 'cli' : '';

  $gettype = gettype($data);

  if (isset($label)) {
    if ($CLI) { $label = $label . ': '; }
    else { $label = '<b>'.$label.'</b>: '; }
  }

  if ($gettype == 'string' || $gettype == 'integer' || $gettype == 'double' || $gettype == 'boolean') {
    if ($CLI) { echo $label . $data . "\n"; }
    else { echo $label . $data . "<br/>"; }
  }
  else {
    if ($CLI) { echo $label . print_r($data,1) . "\n"; } 
    else { echo $label . "<pre>".print_r($data,1)."</pre>"; }
  }
}


// Usage

out('Hello world!');

$var = 'Hello Stackoverflow!';
out($var, 'Label');

Answer 2

in php line breaks we can use PHP_EOL (END of LINE) .it working as "\n" but it cannot be shown on the ht ml page .because we have to give HTML break to break the Line..

so you can use it using define

define ("EOL","<br>");

then you can call it

Answer 3

Because you are outputting to the browser, you have to use <br/>. Otherwise there is \n and \r or both combined.

Answer 4

\n didn't work for me. the \n appear in the bodytext of the email I was sending.. this is how I resolved it.

str_pad($input, 990); //so that the spaces will pad out to the 990 cut off.

Answer 5

For linebreaks, PHP as "\n" (see double quote strings) and PHP_EOL.

Here, you are using <br />, which is not a PHP line-break : it's an HTML linebreak.

Here, you can simplify what you posted (with HTML linebreaks) : no need for the strings concatenations : you can put everything in just one string, like this :

$var = "Hi there<br/>Welcome to my website<br/>";

Or, using PHP linebreaks :

$var = "Hi there\nWelcome to my website\n";

Note : you might also want to take a look at the nl2br() function, which inserts <br> before \n.

Answer 6

I have defined this:

if (PHP_SAPI === 'cli')
{
   define( "LNBR", PHP_EOL);
}
else
{
   define( "LNBR", "<BR/>");
}

After this use LNBR wherever I want to use \n.