Newline data not showing up correctly in vb.net multiline TextBox

Question

I'm populating a multi-line TextBox from MySQL, and the data is basically paragraphs with multiple lines with line breaks in between. My data looks fine in the database; when I copy and paste the data into a text editor (I use NotePad++) directly from workbench, the data looks fine.

There's a curious space between Test2 and Test3, but I can live with that.

When I try and MsgBox it, it looks fine too:

But when it comes to adding it to my TextBox, my problem comes:

I've looked at several resources, including here , but I couldn't find a solution that worked, nor a reasonable explanation why this is happening. Does anyone at least have an explanation so I can figure out a workaround?

Answer 1

It appears, from the text pasted into Notepad++, that the original string copied from MySql Workbench , contains multiple line feed chars and, probably, a space which separates the text parts.

This becomes more evident, since a MessageBox shows the text separated in multiple lines.
The .Net MessageBox wraps the User32 MessageBox function, which allows \\n ( VbLf - CharW(10) ), \\r ( VbCr - CharW(13) ) or both ( VBCrLf ) as line separator(s).
The string parameter of the message part, lpText , will parse and adapt any of these:

The message to be displayed. If the string consists of more than one line, you can separate the lines using a carriage return and/or linefeed character between each line.

A standard TextBox instead requires that a LineFeed+Carriage Return ( \\r\\n ) are used to separate lines of text: when the text is pasted in a TextBox control, since only \\n is used, the text is not separated in different lines.

The RichTextBox control is more international (MacOs also ditched \\r for the *nix \\n ): it uses \\n to separate lines of text.
If we provide \\r\\n (Windows style) as line separator, the control converts \\r\\n to just \\n .
Thus, pasting this text in a RichTextBox, the original line feeds are parsed as intended.