Preserve Line Breaks From TextArea When Writing To MySQL

Question

I'm using a textarea to enable users to input comments. However, if the users enters new lines, the new lines don't appear when they are outputted. Is there any way to make the line breaks stay.

Any idea how do preserve the line breaks?

Answer 1

Two solutions for this:

1. PHP function nl2br():

   e.g.,

   echo nl2br("This\r\nis\n\ra\nstring\r");  // will output This<br /> is<br /> a<br /> string<br /> 

2. Wrap the input in <pre></pre> tags.

   See: W3C Wiki - HTML/Elements/pre

Answer 2

Here is what I use

$textToOutput = nl2br(htmlentities($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')); 

$text is the text that needs to be displayed $textToOutput is the returned text from nl2br and htmlentities so it can be safety displayed in the html context.
ENT_QUOTES will convert both double and single quotes, so you'll have no trouble with those.