Blank Lines

[Joseph Witchard]

In a HTML form that is processed by PHP:

Hello

World!

Would that be output to the browser as:

Hello

World!

or

HelloWorld!

In other words, do you have to do any sort of special formatting in PHP to make it recognize multiple line breaks?

[Coyotelab]

look at this sample:

$message .= "Hello: " . htmlspecialchars($_POST['hello'], ENT_QUOTES) . "<br>\n";
  $message .= "World: " . htmlspecialchars($_POST['world'], ENT_QUOTES) . "<br>\n";

[Joseph Witchard]

I'm sorry, but I don't really understand how that accomplishes what I'm trying to do. What I want to do is when someone types:

This

and this

into a HTML form, for the output to be displayed as:

This

and this

rather than

Thisand this

I apologize if I didn't make my first post clear enough

[NogDog]

Either output the text within <pre>...</pre> tags, or run it through the nl2br() function:

echo "<pre>" . htmlentities($text) . "</pre>\n";
// . . . or . . .
echo "<p>" . nl2br(htmlentities($text)) . "</p>\n"; 

[Joseph Witchard]

Does either method have an advantage over the other?

[Declan1991]

The nl2br is probably best. However, it outputs <br /> so if you are using HTML DOCTYPE, you probably better use

preg_replace("/\n/","<br>",htmlentities($text));

[NogDog]

Ultimately, it comes down to what you are trying to output and how semantically meaningful you want your resulting HTML mark-up to be. You might want to break it up into HTML <p>aragraphs, with:

echo "<p>" . preg_replace('/[\r\n]+/', "</p>\n<p>". htmlentities(trim($text))) . "</p>\n";