Accept line break and special characters in a text area

Question

This qeustion seems simple but i loss lot of my time playing with it.

My requirement is simple i want a text area that supports line break ie if a user enters(line break) and again types some text.When this value is stored in database and if i want to display that text on some page than it should exactly display with same formatting as entered.

Also the text area should support some special characters like this text mofrém .Here these characters are displayed as boxes.

Using tinymce is an option i guess, but is there any simpler solution? Can these text be manipulated using php?

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Found a similar question that has been answered:

Preserve Line Breaks From TextArea When Writing To MySQL

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Posted by user Zuul

Two solutions for this:

1. PHP function nl2br():

eg,

echo nl2br("This\r\nis\n\ra\nstring\r");

// will output
This<br />
is<br />
a<br />
string<br />

2. Wrap the input in <pre></pre> tags.

See: W3C Wiki - HTML/Elements/pre

Edit:

In reply to comment. To store/encode special characters use:

nl2br(htmlspecialchars($text));

Then to decode again special characters:

htmlspecialchars_decode($text);

Reference:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars-decode.php