Question

I have a slight problem with inserting newlines in textareas. After I submit the form the text in database shows something like:

“text\r\nfor” (i’m on windows)

For the following text:
“text
for”

Then after I retrieve the respective text from the database in the textarea it shows:

“text\r\n\for”

I’m using PHP and put the text in the textarea like so:

<textarea name="post_content">{$post_content}</textarea>

I want it to render properly with the newline character instead of \n or \r\n .

Answer 1

The text stored in the database has a single \ which means to escape the n, which happens before a newline can be rendered.

The easiest fix is to store the text with a second \, like this:

text\\r\\nfor

This would then be rendered by PHP as:

text\r\nfor

Which would create the HTML with a newline.