line breaks showing up as \r\n in textarea

Question

I am trying to display a data into textarea which is fetched from tables that i have submitted via another form. The issue comes up when a new line is entered.

The data getting displayed in the textarea is as

lin1\r\nlin2

it should be like

lin1
lin2

I have tried nl2br but it does not work as expected. How can i make things optimized. Thanks

Answer 1

This problem can be solved using stripcslashes() when outputting your data.

Please note that the method above is different from stripslashes() which doesn't work in this case.

I tried using nl2br but it wasn't sufficient either.

Answer 2

I hope str_replace saves you.

<?php
$str='lin1\r\nlin2';
$str=str_replace('\r\n','<br>',$str);
echo $str;

OUTPUT:

lin1
lin2

Answer 3

This is a common question and the most common answers are ln2br or str_replace.

However this is just creating unnecessary code.

In reality the problem is pretty much always that you have run the data through a mysql escape function before displaying it. Probably while you were in the process of saving it. Instead, escape the data for saving but display an unescaped version.

Answer 4

<?php echo str_replace('\r\n', "\r\n", $text_with_line_breaks); ?>

See single quotes & double quotes this is a trick.

A perfect solution for newbies.