Question

I’m trying to work out how I can break up a large block of text with CSS or PHP into paragraphs or line breaks. My PHP script queries a MYSQL database and returns a random number of entries (sentences) depending on the number selected by user. The results are echoed out in one large paragraph.

Is there anyway I can break up this one paragraph into smaller paragraphs? I don’t want a line break after each result.

I can do this with fixed text in HTML with <p> tags or <br> tags but how can I do it with dynamically generated results when I have no idea how long the block of text will be? I’m quite new to PHP. Any suggestions appreciated.

Here is the code:

<?php
$host="localhost"; // Host name 
$username=""; // Mysql username 
$password=""; // Mysql password 
$db_name="db"; // Database name 
$tbl_name="sentence"; // Table name 

// Connect to server and select databse.
mysql_connect("$host", "$username", "$password")or die("cannot connect"); 
mysql_select_db("$db_name")or die("cannot select DB");

$sn=$_POST['numberofsentences'];


$query="SELECT line FROM `sentence` ORDER BY rand() LIMIT $sn";
$result = mysql_query($query);

while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
// do something with $row. The following echos the results and adds a space after each sentence.
echo $row['line'], "&nbsp";
}

// Close the database connection
mysql_close();

 ?>

Answer 1

One quick and easy way would be to set a static amount of sentences per paragraph like 4 or 5 and use that in your loop like so:

$count = 0; 
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { 
    // do something with $row. The following echos the results and adds a space after each sentence. 
    echo $row['line'], "&nbsp"; 
    if ($count >= 4) { 
        echo '<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;'; 
        $count = 0; 
    } else { 
        $count++; 
    } 
}