Question

<tr>
    <td>
        <b>Escalation: 
    </td></b>
    <td>
        <TextArea name='escalation' onKeyDown=\"limitText(this.form.escalation,this.form.countdown,100);\"     
onKeyUp=\"limitText(this.form.escalation,this.form.countdown,100);\">$Text</textarea>You have <input readonly type=\"text\" name=\"countdown\" size=\"3\" value=\"100\"> characters left.
    </td>
</tr>

That is a excerpt of the code im trying to use. Basically I’m trying to fill the text area with a value stored in a php variable, which comes from a SQL database. the Javascript functions limit the amount of text in a block to 100 Chars.

Problem is that it fills whatever space isnt used in the initial value with spaces! I printed the $Text between two quotes so I would know for a fact it doesnt have spaces in the database, which it doesnt. You can also clearly see that I dont have any space at all between the textarea tags so that isnt the issue that I see other posters have.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Yes, I have seen that behavior before. Check to see if the column that you are reading the value from in the database is of type “CHAR” or type “VARCHAR”. It is more efficient to always use fixed-length (CHAR) over variable-length (VARCHAR) field types, so databases are sometimes designed that way. The down side is that shorter data stored in those fields is always padded with spaces.

The solution: You probably have a line in your PHP that looks something like this:

$Text = $row['text'];

Change that line to the following:

$Text = trim($row['text']);

The ‘trim’ function will strip leading and trailing spaces. If you are using fixed length fields, remember that you will HAVE TO pad the values that you write to the database as well. That means that you will have to add leading spaces to the string to be written to the database to make the then proper length for fixed-width field.