Hi
    I am entering Large amounts of text into a text area of a form which gets added to the Database(mysql), Now I want the formatting of the text(paragraphs) to also be saved so that while viewing the text I see it exactly as It was entered.How do I do it?

Thanks

Praveen.;)

Well, if it's a textarea, it _is_ being preserved (as far as the etxt itself is concerned). Output it into another textarea if you don't believe me ;). What you want is to maintain the spacing and newlines when output as part of the general HTML flow, so use egregi_replace, to push your text string through it and replace all spaces with &nbsp;'s and all newlines with "<br />"s. You can detect newlines by saying:

$outPutString = eregi_replace("\n", "<br />", $your_string);

Then output $outPutString, instead of your actual string from the database.

Take a look at http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.eregi-replace.php

More comments:
  I suggest you look at using preg_replace() instead of the ereg version.
  Use nl2br() instead of a regular expression to add <br /> tags to newlines.




Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/

Yes, true. I was in a hurry when I replied earlier. Here's a function I built for reformatting richtext data from textareas:

     function rich_text_format($text_field)
     {
        /*So, we've been passed a bunch of text, full of newlines, and stuff. There's a good chance
        that there are great long reams of text, among all this, that run and run. These will simply
        output on one line unless we do something to impose some sort of wrapping to them. So let's
        impose some word-wrapping, first of all. We use newlines, rather than <br />s at this stage,
        since all newlines will get turned into <br />'s, later on, by preg_replace.*/
        $text_field = wordwrap($text_field, 75, "\n");
        /*Next, let's encode any special characters such as &amp; and so on. We specify that we want
        single quotes encoding, too*/
        $text_field = htmlspecialchars($text_field, ENT_QUOTES);
        /*Now, we build an array of control characters and other stuff we want reformatting...*/
        $patterns = array("/ /", "/\n/", "/\t/");
        /*...and an array of what we want them to be replaced with.*/
        $replacements = array("&nbsp;", "<br />", "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;");
        /*(Add new values to each array as you see fit... Just make sure they correspond with each other and
        refer to the manual for guidance (http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php at time of writing)

        Then do the replacement*/
        $text_field = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $text_field);
        //And send this thoroughly 'munged' piece of text back to where it came from...
        return $text_field;

Well, by replacing \t by &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;... will replace the data from DB to next column in our spreadsheet?

        $patterns = array("/ /", "/\n/", "/\t/");
        /*...and an array of what we want them to be replaced with.*/
        $replacements = array("&nbsp;", "<br />", "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;");

Thanks
Take care
Mekh

mekh dev gurung

Well, you're mixing apples and oranges. If you're formatting text to be displayed in a web browser, you need to fudge things using non-breaking spaces or whatever. If you're formatting text for CSV output, then obviously your HTML hacks won't be appropriate.

That's the beauty of PHP -- you can take the same source data and use PHP to generate the output in whatever format you want.


Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/