Ok, I have a form consisting of 4 text boxes. When the form is submitted, the data is wrote to a temp dat file separated by a "|". My main problem is the last text box. It's actually a multi-line textarea box, but it only shows the first "line" (up until you hit the enter button) not the whole data as entered the first time. Here's the file format:



The above doesn't show right on here, but each line is separated by "<p>/n<p>/n" (paragraph, new line, paragraph, new line)

Now, I have the following to put this data back into the text box:

Code:

$eurom =~ s/<p>/\r/g;

<TEXTAREA name="eurom" rows=6 wrap=virtual cols=60>$eurom</TEXTAREA>

I've tried alot of variations of this but nothing has worked. (regex I mean)

No matter what I try, it will not work. It only shows the first "line" of the data.

Any more ideas?

Nevermind, the CODE button doesn't even work on this forum.

It does if you use it properly :)

I see that. I'm not sure what I did but I got the first post corrected.

Anyway, my form would work like a web forum when you click to EDIT your post. But my problem is that it only shows the first line in the textarea box. It will not display it as it was entered.

Trying changing the \r here to \n:

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com

Thanks Jason, but that's the first thing I tried. It has no change at all. I've tried ALOT of variations to this regex, but nothing has worked.

Are you storing actual \n's in the file? This could definately throw things off.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com

Here's some more history behind the "<p>" tag being in there. This gets displayed on an .shtml page, so I needed to change all "\r" to "<p>" tags to display properly. Here's the regex I used:



So, I figured I could just reverse the regex, but nothing works.

I'm totally out of ideas.

Yes, the file format is in my first post. Each line is separated by "<p>/n"

How do you read the file? If you read line by line, you will obviously have a problem since the record is not all on one line. For example, let's say the file is like this:

Username|Subject|Body



You see the problem? If I read line by line, I'll get the first post correctly, but when I read the second line, I'm only going to get:

jagerman|Test Post 2 - multiple line body|asdfasdf<p>

What you need to do is do something about the \n's before you write the post to the file. If the <p>'s are there, as it seems they are, you can simply remove them. Then, the above example will look like this in the file:





Now, when you read the second line, you'll get the complete record:

jagerman|Test Post 2 - multiple line body|asdfasdf<p>asdfasdf<p>asdfasdf

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com

I'm also assuming a small square in a text file is a newline (\n), right?

Anyway, yes they are in there.

Notepad is picky - it will not show \n as a new line but requires \r\n. Most editors, and more importantly, Perl, will see both \r\n and \n as new lines. (NB - this applies only on Windows systems).

While you may see it all on one line in Notepad, Perl will see it as several lines. You should probably consider switching to an editor such as EditPlus.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com

Jason, you are 100% on to the problem, but I might not know enough about Perl to fix it. Here's the code I use to read it and assign to the variables:

Am I way off?? I tried using arrays (@line) but I got a 500 error.

When you write the post to the file, do this:

$post =~ s/\r?\n/<br>/g;

That will convert all of the newlines to <br>'s. You can adjust as needed - you might be able to leave out the <br>.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com

Got it! You are awesome, thank you very much Jason!!