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 and not just \n")

EDIT:

I forgot to mention that I am saving $_POST['thetextarea'] to a mysql database VARCHAR 255. It seems \r\n is converted to \n.

Answer 1

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

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

Answer 2

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 3

You could also use the PHP_EOL constant:

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

Answer 4

You can do something like this:

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