Textbox help pu-lease

[hegerp]

Hi!

I've made some helping requests here in this forum, and I always get help from you guys. I'm counting on you this time too.

Here's the problem I need help with.

I have a textarea and I'm sending the data inside with a POST and get it on another page with .php as a string.

I need javascript to check how many lines there are and put a certain string (for example: "<br />" at the end of every line.

Is it possible to do this?

We can maybe use another hidden form element to store the data "textarea with the <br>s"...

So any help here would be much appreciated.

THANK YOU!

[Aso]

If you're using PHP, then nl2br (new line to break) should sort you out.

PHP: Select all

$string = 'This is
text
with line
breaks';

echo nl2br($string); 

will echo;

Code: Select all

This is<br />text<br />with line<br />breaks

HTH

[hegerp]

Okay. I messed the first post up a little...

The main thing I want to do is to connect to a database and get the text data from there and then output the data with \n as a javascript alert box.

I made a little sample code and it does not work!

Can you please have a look at it for me?

Code: Select all

<?php
// connect and get the data is fine
$textarea = "Hi!
My name is Bond.
James Bond!"; // This is the text
 
 
$text_separated = nl2br($textarea); // Do the trick you showed me!
$array = explode("<br />",$text_separated); // I make an array from the textarea divided the parts that need a line break
 
echo "<script type='text/javascript'>alert('"; // start of the javascript alert
 
foreach($array as $key => $value){
echo $value; // write the text
?>\n<?php // to show the line break
};
 
echo "')</script>"; //finishing the javascript
?>

The most hurting part is that if I change the $value into a random string it does fine!

[Aso]

Found the problem - posting solution shortly

[Aso]

Ok, the problem lied in your foreach statement. If you look at the source code it generated, you'll see that the JavaScript code looked like this;

HTML: Select all

    <script type='text/javascript'>alert('Hi!\n
    My name is Bond.\n
    James Bond!\n')</script>

In JavaScript, you can't carry the code onto a new line. So in this case, your alert statement broke when it hit the end of the first line.

This new slice of code builds the alert statement first, combining the lines back together into a new, single-line string (with each piece now separated with a'\n' line feed)

PHP: Select all

<?php

// connect and get the data is fine
$textarea = "Hi!
            My name is Bond.
            James Bond!";
    
$text_separated = nl2br($textarea); // Do the trick you showed me!
    
$line_array = explode("<br />",$text_separated); // I make an array from the textarea divided the parts that need a line break
    
foreach ($line_array as $line) {
           
    // we need to remove the carriage returns still in each line and trim unwanted space
    $line = trim( str_replace("\r", '', str_replace("\n", '', $line) ) ); 
           
    // recombine lines (seperated with un-parsed line break \n) into a new string 
      $new_textarea .= $line . '\n';
}
    
echo "<script type='text/javascript'>";
    
echo "alert('" . $new_textarea . "');"; // alert the new string
    
echo "</script>" 
    
?>

Now your source code will look like this;

HTML: Select all

<script type='text/javascript'>alert('Hi!\nMy name is Bond.\nJames Bond!\n');</script>

Any questions, please ask!

[hegerp]

Thank you very much!

You are very helpful. I appreciate sites like this.