formatting help needed - importing .txt from database

[j1mg]

The site i am working on at the moment, has a number of large summary and questionaire pages.
the way i am doing this is through a database, which links to the .txt file and simply includes it in the htm/php template file when required.
this all works well, except that the text is turned into a single line, i loose all new-line / paragraph etc information.
is there a way to rectify this, google has failed to help me in this matter.

many thanks

ps - when linking to the .txt files, should i use relative or absolute locations?

[kleineme]

Hi,

you could use nl2br() but then you would have to quit including the files. Instead you would have to use

$text = file_get_contents($link_to_file);
echo nl2br($text);

[j1mg]

thanks for the response, but i'm a little confused by "quit including the files" do you mean i would have to stop saving the files as .txt files?
i did a search for "nl2br()" and found a few pointers i have changed

<td valign=&quot;top&quot;><?php include(&quot;archive/sum/testing123.txt&quot;); ?></td>

sum_templat.php

into

  		<? $myFile = file(&quot;archive/sum/testing123.txt&quot;);
  // Now $myFile is an array looking like
  // [0] => &quot;row 1&quot;;
  // [1] => &quot;row 2&quot;;
  // [2] => &quot;row 3&quot;;
  // ..... 
  for ($i = 0; $i < count($myFile); $i++) { print &quot;Row &quot;.($i+1).&quot;: &quot;.$myFile[$i]; }; 
  ?> 

sum_template2.php

which is a start, as it least it is recognising the line breaks - just not doing anything about them. if you could point me in the way of a more in depth tutorial or tell me what i'm doing wrong i'd be grateful.

Many Thanks

[kleineme]

Hi,

no, that's not what I meant to say. You still can save your files as .txt files. But you would have to change the way you are accessing those files.

include("file.txt") won't work because you can't use nl2br() on an include. The best way, in my opinion, would be the use of file_get_contents, as this returns the whole file as a string which you can use nl2br() on. Using file() would be a bit more complicated.

Modifying your example it would look like this:

$myFile = file_get_contents("archive/sum/testing123.txt");
print nl2br($myFile);

You would use this code where you've used include() previously.

[j1mg]

excellent - worked perfectly.
thanks.