Question

Basically I have this script that I’m trying to replace the literal text \r\n with <br /> for proper formatting. I’ve tried nl2br() and it didn’t replace the \r\n with <br />. Here’s the code.

$title = isset($post[0]) ? $post[0] : false;
$body = isset($post[1]) ? preg_replace('#(\r|\r\n|\n)#', '<br/>', $post[1]) : false;
echo $title."<br/>".$body;  

Answer 1

$body = isset($post[1]) ? preg_replace('#(\\\r|\\\r\\\n|\\\n)#', '<br/>', $post[1]) : false;

You’ll need three \\\. Inside single quotes, \\ translates to \ so \\\r becomes \\r which gets fed to the preg_replace funciton.

PREG engine has its own set of escape sequences and \r is one of them which means ASCII character #13. To tell PREG engine to search for the literal \r, you need to pass the string \\r which needs to be escaped once more since you have it inside single quotes.