Question

First, I’d like to apologize, I’m still a beginner.

For learning purposes I’m creating a blog engine and I just noticed that when I list the comments, escaped characters like carriage return (pressing enter) are shown in the database correctly, but only a whitespace character when displaying the comments.

I’m using PostgreSQL 8.3.

Here you can see an example database entry:

fema=> select * from comments where id = 54;
-[ RECORD 1 ]-------------------------
id       | 54
authorid | 1
text     | This new line won't show.\r
        : No\r
        : \r
        : new\r
        : \r
        : \r
        : \r
        : lines.
time     | 1341417673
postid   | 15
answerid | 0

Here you can see what var_dump() shows:

string(50) "This new line won't show. No new lines." 

This is how I’m getting the data:

$stmt = db::$db->prepare("select comments.id as commentid ,authorid,text,time,postid,answerid,users.* from comments left join users on users.id = comments.authorId where postid = :postId");
            $stmt->execute(array('postId' => $_GET['p']));
        $commentRslt = $stmt->fetchAll();

Then foreach to iterate through them and replace the mark I’m using to identify things I have to replace:

$currComment = str_replace('{{{cms:comment:text}}}', $commentRslt[$key]['text'], $currComment);

This is how I insert the new comment to the DB:

$stmt = self::$db->prepare('INSERT INTO comments (authorId, text, time, postId, answerId) VALUES (:authorId, :text, :time, :postId, :answerId)');
$stmt->execute(array(   'authorId' => $_SESSION['userId'],
                        'text' => str_replace(array('<','>'), array('&lt','&gt'), isset($_POST['newCommentArea']) ? $_POST['newCommentArea'] : $_SESSION['newCommentArea']),
                        'time' => time(),
                        'postId' => isset($_POST['commentNew']) ? $_POST['commentNew' ] : $_SESSION['postId'],
                        'answerId' => $answerId));

Sorry for the many code samples, but I don’t even know where the problem is and I wanted to be thorough.

So could anyone please tell me how to solve the problem? If only just by telling me where I made the mistake. I really have no clue.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Jut guessing here, but:

Consecutive whitespace is collapsed to a single space by HTML/the browser. Replace newlines with <br> tags if you want to keep them, using nl2br.