Allow returnline in textarea with regular expression

Question

I would like to allow returnlines in a Form textarea . I haven't found the way to add this possibility to my regular expression . Will the return line be stored in the database?

Here is the HTML form:

<form method="post" action="#">
    <textarea name="description" spellcheck="true" maxlength="500"></textarea> 
</form> 

And the PHP code with the regular expression to regulate the textarea input ( true = match the regex = store to database):

if (!preg_match("/^[a-zàâäèéêëîïôœùûüÿç0-9 !?’',.-]+$/i", $POST['description'] )) {
    return false;
}
    return true;
}

Answer 1

You could match new lines (and carriage returns) by adding \\n and \\r :

/^[a-zàâäèéêëîïôœùûüÿç0-9 \n\r!?’',.-]+$/i

But maybe you want to allow all types of white space (like tabs, non-breaking space, ...). Then you can better use \\s :

/^[a-zàâäèéêëîïôœùûüÿç0-9\s!?’',.-]+$/i

Listing all allowable letters might be difficult. There will always be that one other character... like ò . If you are willing to allow anything that could be called a letter in some language or alphabet (even Greek, Cyrillic), then use the \\pL escape in combination with the unicode modifier u at the end.

Note you can also use \\d for matching digits:

/^[\pL\d\s!?’',.-]+$/iu