Displaying 'tabs'?

[Michdd]

Currently I use nl2br() to display the line breaks and what not from text taken from the database. But it seems when I just echo it out the 'tabs' don't show within it. Is there a separate function for this or what?

[Ken2k7]

Try using pre:

<pre style="tab-interval: 5px;">content</pre>

 

Not sure if other tags work.

[ionik]

By 'tabs' I presume you are taking about extra whitespace that is not being parsed out.

 

nl2br will break all \n and the like into <br /> to form a linebreak the whitespace is going simply be a bunch of   characters.

 

Check with firebug and see if the   characters are there, if they are not check to see if they are being striped anywhere (before sending them to the database) or when retrieving them

[Michdd]

The <pre style="tab-interval: 5px;"> kinda works but it messed with my template.. And no, they're not stripped anywhere. If I display this is a <textarea> then the tabs show fine.

 

Edit: But if I look in the webpage source I can see the "tabs" the empty white space... I assume I could just do a str_replace.. but is there a better method?

 

Something like:

 

$variable = str_replace('	', '     ', $variable);

 

Works fine I'd just like to know if there's a better method.

[ionik]

This would be a bit better as it would check for a double space and replace it with 'space'  this way you are not limiting yourself to only 'tabbed' spaces

$variable = str_replace('  ', '   ', $variable);

[thebadbad]

You can do like this forum does, converting tabs to

 

<pre style="display: inline;">	</pre>

 

with

 

<?php
$variable = str_replace("\t", "<pre style=\"display: inline;\">\t</pre>", $variable);
?>

 

It's the only way to make the browser display the tab, AFAIK.