Can a MySQL field contain text that has line breaks?

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An overworked Web Developer who\'s expected to know everything yet given time to study nothing.

Yes.

Do you need to know how to reproduce those line breaks with HTML? Assuming you do.. look at nl2br().

http://www.php.net/nl2br

When a user enters text into a <textarea> field, for example, a newline character is inserted at every line break. It's backslash followed by the letter n or "\n". These are invisible for the most part and HTML doesn't reproduce them without something like the <pre> tag or white-space: pre; using CSS. nl2br inserts an HTML line break where ever this character is present in the text.

Regards,
Rich

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The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
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Thanks for the great response. I'm a newbie so I really appreciate this stuff.

So, if a <textarea> feeds into a MySQL field, and then I print the database info to a file, the line breaks will be preserved?

The reason I'm asking about this is I'm working on a contact database. When the office staff want to do a postal mailing, they'll run a program that queries the database and creates a text file. They'll then burn the text file to a CD and send it to the mailing service to print onto envelopes.

Yes. The ideal field type to contain the data would be text, mediumtext, longtext, whichever is suitable given the necessary constraints on size. But the newline character is passed as part of the data and it won't get removed unless you run an algorithm to remove it specifically. When you write the data to a plain text file and open it with a plain text viewer you'll see the linebreaks where they occured in the <textarea> field. In a browser, when viewed in HTML it won't appear that way unless you use a function like nl2br to insert HTML line breaks or the other methods I mentioned, but if you view the source of the file you'll see the line breaks in the source where they occured in the <textarea> field.

Regards,
Rich

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The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
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