Capture newline from a textarea input

Question

I have a textarea form in my html. If the user hits enter between 2 sentences that data should be carried over to my PHP.

Currently if the user enters:

Answer 1

Try nl2br() instead:

echo nl2br($str);

Answer 2

This is because when you echo it it's being displayed as HTML. A \n character is interpreted as a space. If you view the source you'll see your desired output.

To convert \n to <br> use:

echo nl2br( $str );

Answer 3

The newlines should be included in the string that you get from $_POST["field"]. However, if you then use that string as output in HTML, newlines will be treated as whitespace. To force the line breaks, use preg_replace("/\n/", "<br />", $str).