Line Breaks

Question: How can I enter in <br> tags to a form upon submission?

in other words,...this form that I am typing in, if I hit enter 4 times



my text will move down here. How can I do this?

-- Jason

i think this is what your looking for

$string = nl2br($string);

it converts \n (new line marks) into <br /> tags.

so when you type in a form:

"testing


1.2.3"

it comes out like the way you typed it and not like this

testing 1.2.3
for more information

URL

ahh yes,....I knew I had seen that function before,....thanks Ben




-- Jason

np, basically all nl2br() (New Line To Break) does is this

$variable = str_replace("\n","<br />", $variable);

so if you forget it you can use this

also dont forget php.net's searchable manual

yeah, I am always looking in php.nets manual. The problem is I don't know what I am looking for sometimes

Also, can you point me to a site that explains what the <br /> syntax is?

-- Jason

Taelo,

<br> and <br /> do the exact same thing; just that <br /> follows the XHTML standard of closing all non-ending tags.

ok,...but I don't understand the purpose... I guess I need to read up xhtml

the reason that you have to end non-closing tags with / is simply to maintain well-formedness within xml communications, as well as uniformity in html. all xml elements must have a closing tag or it won't parse. all html elements have to have a closing tag with only a few exceptions (<br>, <hr>) etc. In certain cases it's expressly disallowed.
since xml parsers require everything to have a closing element, no exceptions, you have to do something to close off <br> and others. </br> is expressly forbidden; since anything that isn't recognized as a valid html property after a space in a tag is ignored, / is used to close the tag in xml. xml parsers actually looks for a / within <> that isn't in quotes to denote a closing tag, that in addition to the matching variable name.
so by simply adding the / at the end of the tag, xml sees the tag as closed.

great explanation, thank you

Just for the record, you can also close of tags like br like this

<br></br>

as an xhtml parser will also allow this, but its more common to use <br />