New line doesn't seem to work. php

Question

I've test.php which contains:

function tailShell($filepath, $lines = 1) {
        ob_start();
        passthru('tail -'  . $lines . ' ' . escapeshellarg($filepath));
        return trim(ob_get_clean());
    }
    $test = tailShell('som.log',3);
    echo $test;

som.log contains

1
2
3
4
5
6

When i'm using it, php prints text like that 6 5 4 3 2 without new line, how to fix this?

Answer 1

If you're displaying it in an HTML context (in a browser) it's normal for it to do that because HTML collapses white space, including line breaks. Wrap your output in <pre> tags to retain the line breaks.

function tailShell($filepath, $lines = 1) {
    ob_start();
    passthru('tail -'  . $lines . ' ' . escapeshellarg($filepath));
    return trim(ob_get_clean());
}
$test = tailShell('som.log',3);
echo '<pre>'. $test .'</pre>';