Elegant solution for line-breaks (PHP)

Question

$var = "Hi there"."<br/>"."Welcome to my website"."<br/>;"
echo $var;

Is there an elegant way to handle line-breaks in PHP? I'm not sure about other languages, but C++ has eol so something thats more readable and elegant to use?

Thanks

Answer 1

Because you are outputting to the browser, you have to use <br/>. Otherwise there is \n and \r or both combined.

Answer 2

For linebreaks, PHP as "\n" (see double quote strings) and PHP_EOL.

Here, you are using <br />, which is not a PHP line-break : it's an HTML linebreak.

Here, you can simplify what you posted (with HTML linebreaks) : ne need for the strings concatenations : you can put everything in just one string, like this :

$var = "Hi there<br/>Welcome to my website<br/>";

Or, using PHP linebreaks :

$var = "Hi there\nWelcome to my website\n";

Note : you might also want to take a look at the nl2br() function, to convert \n to <br>.

Answer 3

Well, as with any language there are several ways to do it.

As previous answerers have mentioned, "<br/>" is not a linebreak in the traditional sense, it's an HTML line break. I don't know of a built in PHP constant for this, but you can always define your own:

// Something like this, but call it whatever you like
const HTML_LINEBREAK = "<br/>";

If you're outputting a bunch of lines (from an array of strings for example), you can use it this way:

// Output an array of strings
$myStrings = Array('Line1','Line2','Line3');
echo implode(HTML_LINEBREAK,$myStrings);

However, generally speaking I would say avoid hard coding HTML inside your PHP echo/print statements. If you can keep the HTML outside of the code, it makes things much more flexible and maintainable in the long run.

Answer 4

Not very "elegant" and kinda a waste, but if you really care what the code looks like you could make your own fancy flag and then do a str_replace.

Example:
$myoutput = "After this sentence there is a line break..|.. Here is a new line.";
$myoutput = str_replace(".|..","<br />",$myoutput);

or how about:
$myoutput = "After this sentence there is a line break.E(*)3 Here is a new line.";
$myoutput = str_replace("E(*)3","<br />",$myoutput);

I call the first method "middle finger style" and the second "goatse style".