Hi Patricia,
You can impose width restrictions on the textarea field and forcefully
wrap lines longer than the desired length afterwards (if you save it,
save it as-is for better portability). To wrap text with PHP when you
print it, or want to send the e-mail, there is a function called
wordwrap(). Be sure to split the string at every line break though.
Using white-spaces for formating will only work if your output of the
text is with a fixed-width font. The <pre> html tag will do this for
you, but it won't look pretty. Use CSS to style it is my advise.
Something to bear in mind with regards to e-mail is that the "standard"
line width is 72 characters if I remember correctly.
Comparison of fixed-width fonts
http://www.cfcl.com/vlb/h/fontmono.html
Example code (not tested, so I'm not sure it will run as-is):
<?php
$text = $_POST["textareainput"];
$long_lines = split("\n", $text);
$split_text = "";
$width = 72;
foreach ($long_lines as $oneline) {
$split_text = $split_text . wordwrap($oneline, $width, "\n") . "\n";
}
// $split_text will have one more newline at the end than what you
started with, so let's clean it up
$split_text = substr($split_text, 0, -1);
echo "<pre>" . $split_text . "</pre>";
// or
echo nl2br($split_text);
?>
/Tobias
VanBuskirk, Patricia wrote:
Sorry, I had sent this first to my FileMaker list, but then realized it
was probably more html/php related than database related. FMP is for
FileMaker Pro.
Can you give me an example of your suggestion? I am still quite new at
php and learn much better by example.
Thanks Evert!
Trish
-----Original Message-----
From: Evert Lammerts [mailto:evert.lammerts@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 8:21 AM
To: VanBuskirk, Patricia
Cc: php-db@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Formatting in Text Area
VanBuskirk, Patricia wrote:
I have a "customer description" text area field on my form which feeds
through php to FMP,
What's FMP? Is that what links this email to the db-list?
and spits out a confirmation page and email. The issue I am having
is this ... as the customer types, the text wraps. Many put their own
hard returns and spaces in to organize their description. It seems I
can't get it to do both the wrap and show the actual formatting entered.
If I format the field as physical wrap, the lines run off the page on
the confirmation/printout. If I format it as virtual, then the hard
returns, etc get lost. I have also tried using <PRE> on the
confirmation page and email and that doesn't work either.
Line wrapping in a text area is a property of the text area, not of the
text, as opposite to line breaks and hard returns. This is why you won't
find line break characters at the place the text used to wrap in the
text area.
What you can do of course is to add a div (or whatever container you
feel like) of the same width / height as the text area to the
confirmation page and replace \l\r with br 's.
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