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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T14:32:40+00:00

I have a textarea. User inputs text into the textarea, which can contain line

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I have a textarea. User inputs text into the textarea, which can contain line breaks for formatting purposes. I save this text to the mySQL database as is without adding HTML br breaks. This looks like “text blah blah.\n\nText2 blah blah.” in the database record.

I display the text on a regular HTML page using echo nl2br($text); and the text is nicely formatted, with two line breaks showing up as a two sentences with a blank line between them.

When I send the same text to a textarea prepopulated for the user to edit their original entry, I use the following code:

<textarea><?php echo $text;?></textarea>

I expect that I would get a textarea filled with text that includes some double line breaks as are stored in the database. I don’t use nl2br in this case, because doing so would just literally show the HTML characters (not actually create line breaks — in other words display to the user the 6 characters of the br). Instead, what I get is stripping of any double new lines, so that two new lines back-to-back are now single new lines. The single new lines don’t get stripped out completely — they just stay single new lines.

So, in short, when I send text with formatting that should include a blank line between lines of text, what I get is only single new lines, breaking the important formatting of the text).

How can I preserve all of the newlines when outputting text from the database to a textarea?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This works for me:

    <?php
$txt = "line1\nline2\n\nline4\nline5";
?>
<html>

<body>

<form>
<textarea rows=10><?php echo $txt ?></textarea>
</form>

</body>

</html>

    Note the lack of line3 text and the double \n\n. Loading this form in Firefox gives me a blank line between the line2/line4 text, as expected.

    Check that your text isn’t being mangled elsewhere, and really is in the database as a double-line break.

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