php :: new line in textarea?

Question

How do you create a new line in a textarea when inserting the text via php?

I thought it was \\n but that gets literally printed in the textarea.

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Answer 1

Use like this for dynamically enter each line you can use

echo chr(13)

Answer 2

Just to complete the solution for that issue, as others mentioned use "\n" *(or in some cases "\r\n") instead of '\n'

And when you want to show the textarea contents using php and keeping new lines, you need to use nl2br, so if you assing a varialbe for your text and call it $YOUR_TEXT , you should use that function as: nl2br($YOUR_TEXT)

More details could be found here

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• Unix and Unix programs usually only needs a new line \n, while Windows and Windows programs usually need \r\n.

Answer 3

2020 - Google brought me here for something similar.

Building on answer from user @Va1iant above

Environment:

• HTML 5 / Bootstrap 4.5
• php 7.3.x
• mariadb 10.2.x

Problem :

• Input Form with textarea ( no issue of \r\n appearing in database after posting )
• Edit form with textarea ( \r\n appears in db and also in the edit form after posting )

Solution:

• DB - column type for the textarea content set to 'varchar'
• Edit Form - code snippet for content inside textarea( stripcslashes used ) shown below

<?= isset($_POST['MailingAddress']) ? stripcslashes(misc::esc($_POST['MailingAddress'])) : misc::esc($data['current_mailing_address']) ; ?>

where misc::esc -> return htmlspecialchars($var, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_HTML5, 'UTF-8');

Note :

I did not experiment with white-space: pre-line; as outlined at CSS Tricks so that could be a solution too - without using stripcslashes.

Answer 4

Try

$text = 'text line one' . PHP_EOL . 'text line two';
echo '<textarea>' . $text . '</textarea>';

Will add each text on reparate line in texarea.

Answer 5

What Alay Geleynse said was right, I had the same problem as you and the issue was due to the escape characters (\r, \n) was there. To 'unescaped' the variable I used $var = stripcslashes($var) and it's shown correctly

Answer 6

$row['content']=stripslashes($row['content']);
$row['content']=str_replace('<br />',"newline",$row['content']);
$row['content']=htmlentities($row['content']);
$row['content']=str_replace('newline',"<br>",$row['content']);