PHP: trying to create a new line with "\n"

Question

Hi,

i'm writing this:

echo "foo";
echo "\n";
echo "bar";

and "bar" is not written in the line below.

What am i doing wrong?

Javi

Answer 1

PHP generates HTML. You may want:

echo "foo";
echo "<br />\n";
echo "bar";

Answer 2

Newlines in HTML are expressed through <br>, not through \n.

\n creates a newline in the source code, and source code layout is unconnected to screen layout.

Answer 3

Assuming you're viewing the output in a web browser you have at least two options:

1. Surround your text block with <pre> statements

2. Change your \n to an HTML <br> tag (<br/> will also do)

Answer 4

If you want to write plain text, you must ensure the content type is set to Content-Type: text/plain. Example:

header('Content-Type: text/plain');

If you are dealing with HTML, you have two options. One is to inset a new line using <br> (Or <br /> for XHTML). The other is to put the plain text in a <pre> element (In this case "pre" stands for preformatted).

Answer 5

It will be written on a new line if you examine the source code of the page. If you want it to appear on a new line when it is rendered in the browser, you'll have use a <br /> tag instead.

Answer 6

echo "foo<br />bar";

Answer 7

if your text has newlines, use nl2br php function:

<?php
$string = "foo"."\n"."bar";
echo nl2br($string);
?>

This should look good in browser

Answer 8

If you want a new line character to be inserted into a plain text stream then you could use the OS independent global PHP_EOL

echo "foo";
echo PHP_EOL ;
echo "bar";

In HTML terms you would see a newline between foo and bar if you looked at the source code of the page.

ergo, it is useful if you are outputting say, a loop of values for a select box and you value having html source code which is "prettier" or easier to read for yourself later. e.g.

foreach( $dogs as $dog )
echo "<option>$dog</option>" . PHP_EOL ;