php :: new line in textarea?

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.

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

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

use nl2br(). The nl2br convert \n to <br /> as string .but <br />(string) not create New line. you should repalce <br />(string) to <br> then this will work.

example:

$content = "foo \n bar";
echo str_replace("<br />","<br>",nl2br($content));

result:

foo
bar

split by line:

function SplitLine($txt){
            $txt  = nl2br($txt);
            $txt = explode("<br />",$txt);
            return $txt;
            
        }

I sent

foo
bar 

with textarea as POST method to php.

print_r(SplitLine($_POST['text_area']));

result:

Array ( [0] => foo [1] => bar)

you can use for loop to get data and print it:

$result = SplitLine($_POST['text_area']);
for($i = 0;$i < count($result);$i++){
   echo $result[$i]."<br>";
}

and result is

foo
bar

full code (Only For TEST):

<?php 
//MyFunction
function SplitLine($txt){
    $txt  = nl2br($txt);
    $txt = explode("<br />",$txt);
    for($i = 0;$i < count($txt);$i++){
       echo $txt[$i]."<br>";
    }
    return $txt;        
}
//My Code
if(isset($_POST['submit_data'])){
    print_r(SplitLine($_POST['text_area']));
}
?>
<br>
<form method='post'>
    <textarea name='text_area'></textarea>
    <br>
    <input type='submit' value='Send Data :)' name='submit_data' />
</form>

I had a similar issue and the solution to mine was double-escaping the newline character. \\n