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.

Fa

possible duplicate of #760782 – Lawton

If the text field contains \r\n then spliting on newlines would still work, and just keep extraneous carriage returns in the lines. – Efthim

Answer 1

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

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

Tradition

Yup. Worked for me too, not the \r\n one. – Begat

with a bit difference worked for me, double quote instead of single "/\r\n|[\r\n]/" and I don't know why – Concession

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.

Olenta

Not all user agents are browsers however. – Efthim

@mario: also according to the HTML5 spec (draft I know) lines are terminated by CRLF. dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-textarea-element if I'm correct – Olenta

new link is w3c.github.io/html/sec-forms.html#the-textarea-element – Longdrawn

Answer 3

You could also use the PHP_EOL constant:

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

Butchery

wouldn't PHP_EOL just use the linebreak of the current platform? If so, you don't want it here :) – Olenta

Answer 4

You can do something like this:

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

Spine

"It's important to remember that this function does NOT replace newlines with <br> tags. Rather, it inserts a <br> tag before each newline, but it still preserves the newlines themselves!" - guy at php.net manual – Laodicea