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PHP Build a Basic PHP Website (2018) Adding a Basic Form Working with Concatenation and Whitespace

Pai Boony
PLUS
Pai Boony
Courses Plus Student 4,529 Points
Posted by Pai Boony
Pai Boony
Courses Plus Student 4,529 Points

problem with "\n"

my code is <?php $name = $_POST["name"]; $email = $_POST["email"]; $details = $_POST["details"];

echo "Name " . $name ."\n"; echo "Email " . $email ."\n"; echo "Details " . $details; ?>

in the browser still show: Name pai Email pai@hotmail.com Details aaa

but when I view page source it show line break. Name pai Email pai@hotmail.com Details aaa

Why is that? can anyone help!!

4 Answers

robertrinca
PLUS
robertrinca
Courses Plus Student 11,316 Points
robertrinca
robertrinca
Courses Plus Student 11,316 Points

If you view the source, it should look correct. If you want it to render correctly in the browser, you would need to add some <br />'s, for example:

echo "Name " . $name . "<br />\n";
echo "Email " . $email . "<br />\n";
echo "Details " . $details . "<br />\n";

Hope that helps

Madhuri Charugundla
Madhuri Charugundla
2,383 Points
Madhuri Charugundla
Madhuri Charugundla
2,383 Points

The newline character \n is not an HTML element. It can be used in PHP only. So when you display in browser it still shows up as one line text. You can use <br /> along with \n so that it will display correctly in both browser and in view page source.

Mark Myers
Mark Myers
7,378 Points
Mark Myers
Mark Myers
7,378 Points

Alena shows how to correct this in two different ways towards the end of the video. You can add the HTML <br /> tag as shown above, or use the second method by using <pre> to have the PHP line returns shown properly in the browser. Fun to discover this now, as I have been wondering why we have been double-entering line returns all along throughout these tutorials.

jlampstack
jlampstack
23,932 Points
jlampstack
jlampstack
23,932 Points

Alena corrects herself in the video. \n is a sequence of characters interpreted by php, not by html. To appear on a new line you can do it in one of two ways.

  1. Add <pre> open and close tags around the block of code, or
  2. Use <br> which does get interpreted by html