How can I properly display my text

[HockeyDevil07]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this in, but here it goes. I'm writing a web page with a simple message board for users to discuss a few topics. Everything works fine but when the message text is retrieved from MySQL and put back onto the page the return spaces aren't there. Here's what I mean:

 

"This is the the message body.

 

This is the second line.

 

This is the third line."

 

It shows up my MySQL database exactly as written up there, but when it is put onto the web page it'll show up like:

 

"This is the message body. This is the second line. This is the third line."

 

Obviously I want it to be displayed the way I intended it to be. I know why it's outputting it like that. I was wondering if anyone here could give me some hints on how to parse the message (not sure if that's really what I need to do) or if there are any simple fixes to this problem. Any links to information, tips, or suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance for anyone's help!

[pocobueno1388]

You need to use the function nl2br() when displaying it.

[Stryves]

When you are displaying your page

 

Let's say your Query variable is message3 to grab the body from the database, put this just before where you are going to display the body info

 

$body=nl2br($message3[body]);

 

Then

 

print "$body";

[HockeyDevil07]

Success!

 

wow guys thanks for such a fast response, you just made my day.

[DarkWater]

By the way, just so you know:

 

Inside textareas and files and all sorts of stuff, lines are determined by the presence of ASCII code 0x0A.  This is represented in most programming languages as "\n" (the double quotes are required).  This works great for files and storing the data, because it's just one character, but HTML doesn't treat whitespace literally, as you probably know.  They use <br /> tags in order to enter line breaks.  nl2br() just adds a <br /> before every "\n" in the string.  The "\n" still remains there though.