How Can I Preserve Line Breaks in Text Area Input for Web Applications?

Preserve Line Breaks from TextArea

When working with text areas in web applications, it can be frustrating when line breaks entered by users are not preserved in the output. This issue arises because web browsers automatically remove new line characters (n) from text input, resulting in a single line of text.

To overcome this problem and maintain the intended formatting, there are two effective solutions:

1. PHP Function nl2br()

PHP provides the nl2br() function, which converts new line characters into HTML line breaks (
tags). This allows you to display the text with preserved line breaks.

For example:

<?php
echo nl2br("This\r\nis\n\ra\nstring\r");
?>

Output:

This<br />
is<br />
a<br />
string<br />

2. Wrapping Text in

Tags

Another approach is to wrap the text input between

 and 

tags. HTML treats text enclosed in these tags as preformatted, preserving whitespace and line breaks.

<pre class="brush:php;toolbar:false">
This
is
a
string

See Also:

• [W3C Wiki - HTML/Elements/pre](https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/pre)

By implementing these solutions, you can ensure that line breaks entered by users are preserved when displaying the text, enhancing the readability and user experience of your web application.

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