[ben_johnson1991]

Hey.
I was just wondering how to keep the contents of a textbox the same when it is submited, displayed an edited.

Basically, if the followed is entered

"please help
I don't know what i'm doing"

If would come as
"please help I don't know what i'm doing"

How can I keep the wrapping?

I've seen a few forums, but they arent clear

could you should be where certain functions need to go, and if it will work with displaying and future editing?

Cheers!

[wirehopper]

I'm not sure what you're requesting, since if the textarea isn't wide enough for the whole string on entry, it wraps, without an CR/LF, but later displays 'unwrapped' when it has a wider area.

Assuming you want to force wrapping, based on the width of the textarea, you could use: PHP: wordwrap - Manual

If the <textarea> tag has 35 columns, you could set the wordwrap to be 35.

[ben_johnson1991]

Hey.

I simple have
<textarea name="" cols="10" rows="5">Words go Here</textarea>

And obviously when the user types, presses enter, and a this produces a new line.

but once submited to the database or printed, all line breaks do not appear.. it just comes all as one long paragraph..

and I was wondering how to keep the layout of the text as the user intended to stay the same.


Similar to this site, where I write in the reply box, all of which im typing are keeping their layout, including all of the line breaks.

Does that make sense?

Cheers!

[dayworker]

I don't think there's any easy way to do this. The textarea doesn't have a line feed where it wraps at the col width, only where the user inserts it by hitting return. Maybe strText.replace("\n", "<br><br>") can help with a database field.
I've found client side formatting with JavaScript is labor intensive. Generally it seems easier to add the formatting server side using the Perl Text::Wrap module. I don't know what PHP can do.
For a little quick formatting I notice the 'pre' html tag holds on to the paragraph indents.


<script type="text/javascript">
function showText()
{
var theText = document.getElementById('tatext').value;
var strText = theText.replace("\n", "<br /><br />");
var newText = "<pre>" + strText + "</pre>";
document.getElementById('TAT').innerHTML = newText;
}
</script>

<textarea id = "tatext" rows = "10" cols = "40" wrap = "hard"></textarea>
<br />
<input type = "button" value = "UP" onclick = "showText()">
<hr>
<div id = "TAT">&nbsp;</div>