PHP and textareas

[ktsirig]

Hi all,
I have a page which includes a textarea fro the user to submit data in order to be retrieved from Mysql tables

Question: I am confused about the 'wrapping' thing of textareas.
I have tried 'virtual' and 'physical' and nothing seems to work. What I want to do is when the user supplies ,for example, 4 data separated by <ENTER>, the page break not to dissapear, that is, I want

data1
data2
data3
data4

to remain as above and not

data1data2data3data4

What am I doing wrong???

[sypher]

data1
?

[grahame]

Originally Posted by ktsirig

What I want to do is when the user supplies ,for example, 4 data separated by <ENTER>, the page break not to dissapear, that is, I want

data1
data2
data3
data4

to remain as above and not

data1data2data3data4

What am I doing wrong???

You're doing nothing wrong - just that the new line character when included in an output stream of HTML just gives a white space.

Echo your ouput using:
nl2br(htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($_REQUEST[fred])))

where "fred" is the name of your textarea.

This solutions also protects you against users who echo HTML tags within your text area; in detail

stripslashes removes any extra \ characters added by PHP
htmlspecialchars encodes characters such as < & and "
nl2br changes any new line characters into
tags

[ktsirig]

I guess I wasn't very clear in the first place.
Tha data which the user will write in the text area, are not shown to the screen via a PHP script. Instead, they are used as input for another PHP program doing other job. So, my problem is that I need to 'hold' the newline characters that may be inserted by the user when he/she presses the 'ENTER' key.
For example, if user writes:

My name is
Nick

the PHP program called through the textarea must treat the above lines as they are and not like

My name is Nick

That is my problem: What must I do to preserve the newline characters.

I think grahame's proposal is what I need.
Will try that!
Thanx to both of you for your time!!