If I have a form that inserts information (text and alot of it) into a database, and I want it to come out all formatted by paragraphs, as someone would have entered it, what do i need to do? All of the stuff coming out of the database that was entered comes out as one solid body of text, as opposed to showing ti like page breaks. Any ideas?

Here's a FAQ <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>
www.udzone.com/showDetail.asp?TypeId=7&NewsId=1247

Joel Martinez

----------
Is this thing on?....

This is a very common problem.

The problem is that when people enter text in a textarea and when they type Enter, the character \n is inserted.

This character is correctly stored in your database, but your problem is that when you output it, the \n is also outputed. And this character doesn't mean NOTHING in html.

You must replace all \n by a &lt;br&gt; code.

In PHP you have the function nl2br($string) that do it for you.


<i>Note that you can do it too with replacing \n by &lt;p&gt;, but it gives bigger space.</i>

Ok so how would I do this in ASP using SQL 7.0 server? Would I use this string to interpret the information as it is entered, in the table, or as it is output to a page?

Well,

what I usually does is to leave the text entered unmodified.

I just replace the \n when I print the text in an HTML structure.

I looked at the FAQ joelmartinez pointed, and it should be allright for you.

straight from the FAQ you inspired.
<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote> &lt;%= rs.fields("msgBody".value %&gt;

Change that, to this, and you're set...

&lt;%= replace(rs.fields("msgBody".value, VbCrLf, "&lt;br&gt;" %&gt;<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>
I would do it as you output, because then you can put the value back into a textarea for editing, and you wont have the "&lt;br&gt;"'s in the textarea to mess with things...

Joel Martinez

----------
Is this thing on?....