Question

I have a form into which I entered a newline character which looked correct when I entered it, but when the data is now pulled from the database, instead of the white space, I get the \n\r string showing up.

I try to do this:

$hike_description = nl2br($hike_description);

But it doesn’t work. Does anyone know how this can be fixed? I am using PHP.
And here is the page where this is happening. See the description section of the page:
http://www.comehike.com/hikes/scheduled_hike.php?hike_id=130

Thanks,
Alex

Answer 1

This means, you have probably plain text ‘\n\r’ strings in the db.

Try to sanitize db output before display:

$sanitized_text = preg_replace('/\\[rn]/','', $text_from_db);

(just a guess).

Addendum:

Of course, as Col. Shrapnel pointed out, there’s something fundamentally wrong
with the contents of the database (or, it is used this way by convention and you don’t know that).

For now, you have fixed a symptom partially
but it would be much better to look for the reason for these escaped characters
being in the database at all.

Regards

rbo