Question

I am trying to move a old Classic ASP site to run in PHP. I am rewriting bits of it, however I have come across the following function that is causing me some problems. Basically the function FixForSQL is run on everything before adding it to the database and then FixForHTML is run on data returned with a SQL query to format it for display.

At the moment if I display a block of text retrieved from the database in PHP it shows as one huge block of text with no paragraph breaks, I presume because I haven’t done the replace of Chr(13) and whatever Chr(9) is!

Does anyone know how to reproduce whatever is happening in PHP 5?

 Function FixForHTML(tmpText1)
    Dim tmpText2
    tmpText2 = tmpText1
    tmpText2 = Replace(tmpText2,Chr(13),"</p><p>" & vbCrLf)
    tmpText2 = Replace(tmpText2,Chr(9),"&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;")
    FixForHTML = tmpText2
 End Function

 Function FixForSQL(tmpText1)
    Dim tmpText2
    tmpText2 = tmpText1
    tmpText2 = Replace(tmpText1,vbCrLf,Chr(13))
    tmpText2 = Replace(tmpText2,Chr(39),String(2,39))
    FixForSQL = tmpText2
 End Function

Answer 1

Chr(13) is the the character whose ASCII code is 13. You can get it in PHP with, you guessed, chr(13).

13 is the code for Cariage return. While 9 is for Horizontal tab. In PHP you can also get those characters in a parsable string (one delimited by "s) with \n, respectively \t.

ASCII table

Sample code for PHP:

$text = str_replace(array("\n", "\r"), array("</p><p>", "&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;&#xa0;"), $text);

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As for the FixForSQL function, it just replaces ' characters with '' to escape them for the SQL query.