line breaks in textarea; end of line characters?

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

I have a form that I am submitting to a database, then editing again. The textarea does not maintain the line breaks! Of course this is highly annoying. I have tried to substitute \r\n with various things, but nothing seems to work. Any ideas? I am also wondering if there is a way to display what the end of line character is, even some little perl code. Sometimes I wonder what all the different line endings are because of various apps (I am on a mac, so some use mac, some unix, others input may have windows, etc.). Is there some way to see what line endings are? The preview on this does it fine...what am I doing wrong!!! THANKS!

Michael Jensen
michael at inshift.com
http://www.inshift.com

Comment on line breaks in textarea; end of line characters?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: line breaks in textarea; end of line characters? by idsfa (Vicar) on Oct 23, 2003 at 04:26 UTC
$/ and $\ seem to be what you are looking for. Look for $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR and $OUTPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in perlvar. Remember, when you stare long into the abyss, you could have been home eating ice cream.	[reply]
Re: line breaks in textarea; end of line characters? by inblosam (Monk) on Oct 22, 2003 at 23:59 UTC
Some more info: The reason I wonder about the various apps is when copying text from them and then pasting it into a textarea. Also, I am using DBI and CGI::ReadParse for capturing the variables and updating the record in the database. Anything would help, I just feel stuck! Michael Jensen michael at inshift.com http://www.inshift.com	[reply]
Re: line breaks in textarea; end of line characters? by inblosam (Monk) on Oct 23, 2003 at 00:12 UTC
Okay, false alarm. I figured out how to preserve the line endings. BUT I still am interested in info about line endings and how to look at what is at the end of a line of text. What is cJ, cM, cJcM and their relationship to \r, \n, etc. Are there more? Michael Jensen michael at inshift.com http://www.inshift.com	[reply]
Re: Re: line breaks in textarea; end of line characters? by etcshadow (Priest) on Oct 23, 2003 at 03:19 UTC
cJ or ^J (or ctrl-J) are some applications' means of representing the newline character (NL, "\n", ascii 0x0A, etc). Likewise cM or ^M (or ctrl-M) for the carriage return character (CR, "\r", ascii 0x0D). ------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq	[reply]
Re^2: line breaks in textarea; end of line characters? (a rant) by tye (Sage) on Oct 23, 2003 at 14:24 UTC
"\cJ" is CTRL-J ("Control J"), which is what ASCII uses for "\n". "\cM" is CTRL-M, which is what ASCII uses for "\r". (Old Macs claim to be ASCII but get these two associations backward.) You might want to read a recent related rant of mine: Re^4: Line Feeds (rumor control) - tye	[reply]