Automatic newlines and formatting for blogging software

Question

I'm writing by own blogging engine in PHP with a MYSQL backend database. MY question is: How would you go about making user comments and blog posts include newlines wherever they are appropriate?

For example, if a user hits the return key in the message/comments box how would this translate into a new line that would show in the browser when the comment is viewed?

Answer 1

PHP has a function: nl2br which turns new lines into <br />

www.php.net/nl2br

Answer 2

Replace \n\n with </p><p> and then replace \n with <br>.

PS: Pirate day was last week :).

Answer 3

It's also important what your using for a comment editor. If your using a standard textbox then yes, nl2br is what your looking for. If your going a bit more advanced such as using a WYSIWYG editor like tinyMCE, then it has configuration that can handle that for you.

Answer 4

nl2br() (http://php.net/nl2br) is perfectly good, however that Wordpress Guy (Matt Mullenweg) has a really good function, which is a bit more advanced as it converts double line breaks to paragraphs instead (better semantically). You can find it in the Wordpress source code or here: http://ma.tt/scripts/autop/

Answer 5

If you happen to need more formatting options (beyond paragraphs), employ something like Text_Wiki or PHP Markdown.

The advantages would be:

• no need to allow HTML and deal with all the filtering (that's good :-))
• clear/familiar guide to formatting data
• a lot of flexibility when you generate the HTML (in the end for display)

The disadvantages:

• no HTML (blessing and curse ;-))
• people might not be familiar the syntax