显示输入数据的最佳实践是什么 - textarea 与 p 标签

Question

I have a form that users create a profile. In the form there is a textarea in which hey put their blurb / description whatever.

Later when I want to show the profile in a view only screen, what is best practice? To use a <p> tag or an html tag?

It appears I lose the paragraphs etc when I display the data in a <p> tag.

If, the best practice is to maybe use a readonly textarea for view purposes, how can one dynamically adjust the rows depending on the length of text?

Answer 1

Textareas are designed for accepting input from users, not displaying data back to them.

You need to process the submitted data before displaying it on the user profile. Typically this would involve formatting (like splitting the content on double new lines and then wrapping each part of the result with paragraphs) and implementing protection against XSS attacks.

For formatting, you might consider using a Markdown engine (similar to what Stackoverflow does).

Answer 2

Use the <p> tag. It is ok, but you should modify the contents, before output at least with two functions:

1) htmlentities() - to protect against XSS attacks and print any html symbols as text

2) nl2br() - to add <br/> tags (html new line) next to \\n symbols (new line in text format)

You can look at the <pre> tag as well, then you do not need the nl2br() function