I need to find a way to have text inserted true a basic textarea to become paragraphs without using the <p></p> tags. Before I used Coldfusion and they have a cusom text area that was doing that with the all text. So if you typed some text and gave a hard return and typed some more text. It became two paragraphs in the database. Can this be done in PHP as well or do I need to integrate some Javascript/jQuery?
Thank you in advance!
Hi donboe,
are you asking how to format input received from a text area before inserting it into the database?
Hi Pullo. Yes that is what I am asking, creating paragraphs without using the <p> & </p> tags
Ok then, couldn’t you just use a regex to swap line breaks for whatever your desired formatting is?
I was looking into that but what about the first paragraph. I just start typing withou a line break. This is for a client not for me. I wouldn’t have a problem with that! I need tha <p> tag for the first paragraph as well since that is how I have declared things in my css
Can you provide an example of what is being submitted via your form and then a second example of what you would like to convert it to before entering it in the database.
I have a feeling I’m not quite understanding what you are wanting to do.
Hi Pullo. Just like i am entering text here on Sitepoint. I start typing a text
and now I started two lines below. Here on Sitepoint that would give me two paragraphs.
What I need to is having this inserted into the database without having t use the the <p> tags. I cant ask that from clients!
Edit: I could adjust my CSS a bit though!
So when you have this:
Some text\
\
Some more text\
\
Even more text
You need this:
<p>Some text</p><p>Some more text</p><p>Even more text</p>
I’m still not sure i understood this right.
Yes that is what i am after (this is how I would like to see it front-end) but backend (in the text area) it should not give me those <p></p> or
. But how to accomplish that with a standard text area?
Sorry donboe, I really don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish.
What I have understood, so far:
You have a form.
In the form is a text area.
The form is submitted to a server-side PHP script which inserts your text into a database.
When you enter the following into the text area:
Text
Text
Text
It arrives at your PHP script like this:
Text\
\
Text\
\
Text
(the \ character representing a line break)
What I have not understood:
What do you want to do with it before inserting it to the database?
I have to head off soon, so will be offline in about 15 minutes.
I think he wants to do something like this.
<?php
$sometext = "Some text\
\
Some more text\
\
Even more text";
$output = "<p>" . str_replace("\
\
", "</p><p>", $sometext) . "</p>";
echo $output;
?>
Yup. My thoughts, too.
I believe the values for return are different based on system the code is running on. Might need to be
\r in some cases.
$output = "<p>" . str_replace("\
\\r", "</p><p>", $sometext) . "</p>";
Text
Text
Text this is indeed how I need it in the database. But on the frontend will this represent:
<p>Text</p>
<p>Text</p>
<p>Text</p>
So now are you echoing this text in the text area? Is that what you mean by front end?
You are right. Maybe I did not explain it right. With frontend I mean how it show on the website, but also in the controlroom (the textarea) the cliens should not have to deal with any <p> or whatever tags
Then it’s probably best to store POSTed text in the DB as sent (In field type text) then use the <p> formatting where needed.
I know this topic has been covered many times in many places.
This POST looks like a good example.
It takes into consideration single line breaks and goes like this.
# first, lets trim starting/trailing whitespace
$text = trim($sometext);
# temporarily replace two or more consecutive newlines
# into SOH characters (not used in normal texts)
$text = preg_replace('~(\\r\
|\
){2,}|$~', "\\001", $text);
# convert remaining (i.e. single) newlines into html br's
$text = nl2br($text);
# finally, replace SOH chars with paragraphs
$text = preg_replace('/(.*?)\\001/s', "<p>$1</p>\
", $text);
# test
echo $text;
And a working example
<html>
<body>
<?php
$sometext = (isset($_POST['sometext']) ? $_POST['sometext'] : '');
# first, lets trim starting/trailing whitespace
$text = trim($sometext);
# temporarily replace two or more consecutive newlines
# into SOH characters (not used in normal texts)
$text = preg_replace('~(\\r\
|\
){2,}|$~', "\\001", $text);
# convert remaining (i.e. single) newlines into html br's
$text = nl2br($text);
# finally, replace SOH chars with paragraphs
$text = preg_replace('/(.*?)\\001/s', "<p>$1</p>\
", $text);
# test
echo $text;
?>
<form method="post" action="" class="validate">
<textarea name="sometext"><?php echo $sometext; ?></textarea>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" name="submit" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
This is a very nice example which I indeed can use and I think I start to understand the principle but I am still confused but that is most definately because I did not explain myselfthe right way. I will try it again.
I don’t have a problem inserting the text in the database with line breaks by using nl2br:
Some text\
\
Some more text\
\
Even more text
Thanks to you guys (Drummin & Pullo) I don’t have a problem either to echo that result in a proper way on the website convered to paragraphs:
$output = "<p>" . str_replace("\
\
", "</p><p>", $sometext) . "</p>";
Where I have a problem with though is how to echo this result in the text area when the site owner want to update the text. When I echo the row in the the text area it shows up like:
Some text\
\
Some more text\
\
Even more text
But like i said I don’t want the client to see those
's What I am looking for is that the text in the text area show like this:
Some text
Some more text
Even more text
I hope I make myself a bit clearer this way
Ok, I’ve been playing around with this.
I made a simple demo page:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>DB fun</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="donboe_db.php">
<textarea name="sometext" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" name="submit" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
On this page I entered the following into the text area:
Some text
More text
Even more text
I submitted the form to a small PHP script, which inserted it into the database:
<?php
$conn = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=sitepoint', '****', '****');
$sometext = $_POST['sometext'];
$sql = "INSERT INTO donboe (sometext) VALUES (:sometext)";
$q = $conn->prepare($sql);
$q->execute(array(':sometext'=>$sometext));
?>
Then I dumped the table and got this:
--
-- Table structure for table `donboe`
--
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `donboe` (
`sometext` varchar(255) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
--
-- Dumping data for table `donboe`
--
INSERT INTO `donboe` (`sometext`) VALUES
('Some text\\r\
\\r\
Some more text\\r\
\\r\
Even more text');
As you can see, the line breaks from the text area ended up as \\r\ , presumably as I’m on Linux.
I then modified my initial script to fetch the value from the db and display it in the text area:
<?php
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=sitepoint', '****', '****');
$select = 'SELECT sometext';
$from = ' FROM donboe';
$sql = $select . $from;
$statement = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$statement->execute();
$results=$statement->fetchColumn();
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>DB fun</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="donboe_db.php">
<textarea name="sometext" rows="10" cols="50"><?php echo $results; ?></textarea>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" name="submit" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
And I saw:
Some text
More text
Even more text
formatted correctly.
I’m not sure how this helps you, but it was interesting that I couldn’t reproduce your issue at all.
To move this forward:
Could you do a dump of your DB table and let us see how the line breaks are being stored.
Please post the relevant parts of the results here.