Textareas，New Lines和nl2br的问题

Question

I'm having trouble getting data out of the database and echoing out in a HTML page textarea.

This is the code used to get the data into the database:

$_SESSION['content'] = mysqli_real_escape_string($link, strip_tags($_POST['content'],'<a>'));

This simply strips HTML tags except for links and stores in the database. If you look in the database, the line breaks are invisible but there, so i assume they are \\n and \\r.

If i were to type into a textarea:

This should be a 

New line

The database stores this as:

This should be a<br>
New line

When echoed out into a textarea, this is what's displayed:

This should be a \r\n\r\nNew line

I'm sure i'm missing something very simple, any help greatly appreciated.

UPDATE:

If i remove mysqli_real_escape_string, the line breaks are preserved and work perfectly, do I have to sacrifice security for this?

SOLVED:

mysqli_real_escape_string causing the problem, do not echo out a variable which has had this applied. Only use mysqli_real_escape_string when inserting, deleting, etc from a database, not before, definitely not after ;)

Thanks everyone!

Answer 1

Use the correct HTML/CSS.

;-)

The line breaks all work in an HTML pre tag, or in a tag with the CSS white-space property set to:

white-space: pre;

Resources:

http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_text_white-space.asp

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/whitespace.html

Answer 2

This worked for me:

function br2nl( $input ) {
    return preg_replace( '/\<br.*\>/Ui', '', $input );
}

Answer 3

For very long lines, you also need the text to wrap instead of potentially break out of its parent container. To cover this case, but also preserve new lines, use following css:

white-space: pre-wrap;

resource: https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/w/whitespace/

Answer 4

Firstly, you shouldn't be using nl2br as this will change your \\n 's to <br> 's.

You will most likely need to strip the slashes echo stripslashes($_SESSION['content']) .

Edit following further comments:

If the data is stored as <br> 's in the database, you can just do str_replace('<br>',"\\n",$string); which will convert the <br> 's into \\n 's

Answer 5

The nl2br function is working with that content as a string: http://codepad.org/M2Jw9KQJ

This leads me to believe that you are not echoing out the content you claim you are.

Are you sure the content in the DB is as you say it is? Perhaps you need to go the other way round:

function br2nl( $data ) {return preg_replace( "!<br.*>!iU", "\\n", $data );}