php encode text upload to database

[MSIuser]

I have an article submission script that I wrote which uploads an article to a database. I then use php to access it again, only when i echo or print it, the line spaces dont show up. Therefore I'm looking to know if there is a way to encode a variable string which has line breaks to instead have
tags. It's basically how do I manage what this forum script does when someone uploads something like

hello

help

me

in order to get the line breaks into html.

[Jova]

Have you tried out the fread or fopen function to check if the line is blank?

I think at the end of each line, there is some sort of code that says '\r\n'. \r and \n means end of line.

fread
http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.fread.php

fopen
http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php

You could validate the length of the line say like

PHP Code:

//read text from file

// run WHILE loop

// line from text file is placed in a variable
// called $line
$line = linefromfile;

// get length of line from text file
$linelength = strlen($line);

// validate length of line
if ($linelength == 0) {
     //ignore blank line

} else {
    // print line full of text
    print ($line ."<br>");
}

// end WHILE loop 


I have started using PHP a few months ago, so I may be wrong about the code above and it could be better.

[mairving]

Pretty easy to do using PHP's nl2br function. Basically it will add a BR at each newline for you.

[MSIuser]

Thanks marving, ended up finding that solution when I started reading through a dedicated php forum. Also using the str_replace() as well.