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Leading line break in textarea 1

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Sleidia

Sleidia

Technical User
May 4, 2001
1,284
FR

There must be a dumb solution but I'm too tired to find out by myself :

I have this data in the db :

Code: 
English
French
German

[ ! ] Note the leading line break above "English"

Now, when I display the data in a textarea, the leading line break disappears :(

I know the leading line break is still alive because a nl2br on the data shows this :

Code: 
<br />
English<br />
French<br />
German<br />

So, how do I display this leading linebreak in the textarea so that I can store it again in the database?

Thanks a lot! :)

 
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can you provide a link to the page where this is not working? it sounds like a browser issue rather than anything to do with php.
 
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Hello jpadie :)

Sorry, I can't post any link here. Too bad there is no private messaging available on this site.

Anyway, I've checked on multiple browsers and it's the same on all of them :

The leading line break is there in the textarea when I look at the HTML source but it doesn't show itself on the page.

HTML source :

Code: 
<textarea name="form_elem_values[select][13]" class="field1">
English
French
German
Italian
Spanish
Portuguese
Romanian
Hungarian
Russian
Other</textarea>

PHP source :

Code: 
<textarea name=\"form_elem_values[select][" . $j . "]\" class=\"field1\">" . $row[1]["elem_values"] . "</textarea><br />
 
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your code shows that there is a line break present. otherwise English would be on the same line as the textarea tag.

so hopefully problem solved?
 
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I wish it would! :)

The problem is that I need to have the leading line break visible not only in the source code but in the page as well.

The reason is that this textarea is a field meant for the construction a select menu. Each line of text represents an <option></option>. So, the first line being empty means that the select menu will have a blank default value displayed.
The user must see that a line break exists.
 
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try this. ugly as sin though
Code: 
$ta = trim($row[1]["elem_values"]);
$ta = "\n" . $ta;
echo <<<HTML
<textarea name="form_elem_values[select][$j]" class="field1">
{$ta}
</textarea>
<br />
HTML;

note that you need to use heredoc bit to make this work. if you would rather keep as it were then add two \n

then, i would recommend, trim the input before inserting into database and add back the number of blank lines that you want. otherwise i suspect that the blank lines may multiply.
 
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Thanks but you're right about the ugliness ahaha
And it's not practical anyway.
But why exactly doesn't the leading line break show in the textarea?? I really don't get it.
 
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i suspect it's a browser thing. it is implicitly trimming the leading line break because it doesn't believe that anyone would want it (and there is no text). i suspect if you put an &amp; before the break, the browser would honour it anyway.
 
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