TheDoc has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a form with a textarea, and people are copying & pasting/typing in entries that contain hard returns. This is then printed into a text file. When the file is accessed, the hard returns mess up reading from the file. I tried to catch \r & \n using
$blah =~ s/\r/<br>/;
&
$blah =~ s/\n/<br>/;
but these still miss a good number of the returns. Is there any way I can fix this?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: catching \n
by tedrek (Pilgrim) on Aug 07, 2003 at 01:20 UTC

    You are probably looking for /g, substitute globally. Your example will only get the first \r and \n in $blah. Just use something like this which will also handle DOS style returns

    $blah =~ s/\r?\n/<br>/g;

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      Or, if you want to be really portable, you could use s/\r?\n|\n?\r//g. That should catch most every platform's newline style, IIRC.

      bbfu
      Black flowers blossom
      Fearless on my breath

[reply]
[d/l]

        If the web client (browser) doesn't use ASCII "\r\n"1 for newline in the text it sends to you, then the web client is broken, IMHO.

        1Note that this is not ambiguous. I know that "\r\n" on old Macs results in ASCII "\n\r", but that is because those Macs are near-ASCII systems despite them claiming to be ASCII systems. q-:

                        - tye
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Re: catching \n
by graff (Chancellor) on Aug 07, 2003 at 02:58 UTC
    If you don't mind having multiple consecutive line breaks (i.e. empty lines) collapsed into a single <br> tag, you could do: 
    $blah =~ s/[\r\n]+/<br>/g;

    [download]
    (Just because I don't recall off-hand...
    I'd like to test whether there's visible difference...

    between single and double <br> tags...
    Yup, there is.)
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Re: catching \n
by TheDoc (Initiate) on Oct 07, 2003 at 01:29 UTC
    This doesn't have to deal with \n.... but is there an easy way to find any punctuation in a sentence and rip it out? or would I have to type in ?|.|,| and whatnot in the regex?
[reply]
      ok so I just said 
      unless ($msg =~ /[a-z]|[A-Z]|[0-9]/g) {
$msg = "a";
}

      [download]
      and that seemed to fix the problem... so false alarm I guess
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[d/l]

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