PHP - How can I get a new line in a textarea?

Question

I have a textarea that I need to put a new line into with some dashes above. I have tried nl2br but that just echos the
tag. I have also tried to concat the "\n" but it is ignored.

What this is for is an email like system. When the user replies to an email, I want the old message below with a seperator like a few dashes. I can't get this to work though.

new message starts here

--------------
old message here

Can someone please give a hand?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try a return character: \r

According to this article, the \n newline character should work. What is happening when you are inserting the \n character into the string using double quotes?

This works for me:

 <textarea>test
testing</textarea>

it properly creates the next line. Check to make sure your source code looks something like that, with n actual line break in the source where you want it to be.