Use PHP to maintain format of a textarea

Hy Ho,

It is possible to maintain the format of a text area with a PHP form so that a message that is mail'd to the admin is formatted nicely.

ie. If someone writes in the textarea,

Dear Sir,

I am writing in connceti....

Many Thanks,

At the moment it emails as

Dear Sir, I am writing in connceti... Many Thanks,

If not then I suppose the solution is Rich Text Editor replacement textarea. Thats all wel开发者_高级运维l and good, but what if javascript is disable.

Any ideas,

Marvellous

You probably need to replace (depending on system):

\n\r   or   \n   or   \r 

By:

<br />

PHP function needed:

nl2br()

At this point it seems as though your emails might be sent in HTML format. HTML format automatically removes the line breaks if the given input is not in HTML format. If you don't want HTML formatting then try sending the message plain text, then your line breaks should still show.

To send the message as plain text, simply use the PHP mail() function, without any additional headers:

mail('john@gmail.com', 'Test Email', 'My Message...

with a line break!');

If you are still having problems, try integrating an HTML WYSIWYG editor, such as the powerful TinyMCE editor.

Note: for the HTML editor to send emails properly, you will need to send emails messages in HTML format (where you would need to supply headers as the fourth parameter in the mail() function). This will, for sure, solve your line break issues.

Hope that helps,
spryno724

The newlines in a <textarea> are preserved by both the browser and PHP. Probably they get lost in the email body itself or they are simply not being displayed by the browser even if they are there.

If you are sending a HTML mail you need to do nl2br(htmlspecialchars($your_textarea_data)) to add the necessary <br> tags.

If you are sending a plain text mail check if you are mixing LF (Unix-style) and CR+LF (DOS-style) newline sequences that maybe confuse your e-mail client.

This depends purely in your email format.

When you type that text, it actually looks like this

Dear Sir, \n
\n
I am writing in connceti....\n
\n
Many Thanks,

If you're sending text mail, you have to make sure the linebreaks are not stripped out. And if you're sending out HTML email, you have to make sure you replace those linebreaks for <br> tags