Reading text from MySQL with '\n' and displaying it in a textarea

[shmoyko]

Hello all,

 

I've been searching for days for the answer to this.

 

Basically, I query a MySQL database and store the results in an array. One of the fields in the database is of the type 'text' and it contains new line characters ('\n').

 

I would like to display this text fields inside a <textarea> box where the '\n' gets converted to a visual new line.

 

How would I do this with preg_replace?

 

PHP line:

echo preg_replace("???", "<br>", $some_array['some_text']);

where ??? would be the regular expression.

 

For example, I would like to change 'a \n b' into 'a <br> b'. Right now I simply get 'a \n b' back, no matter what I try to replace the '\n' with.

 

nl2br() doesn't seem to work.

 

Many thanks!

 

[shmoyko]

solved with a function:

function test($abc="") {
       $tmp = str_replace("<br>","\n",str_replace("\\n","<br>",htmlentities($abc)));
       echo $tmp;
}

 

and then in HTML

<textarea name="description" id="description"><?php test($programme['description']);?></textarea>