Okay. What would I do with returns in a Javascript function parameter? For example:

onclick="displayEditNotesModal('1', 'Hi.

Hi again.', 'collegeNotes');"

Wreaks havoc! Is there a PHP or Javascript function that will either strip the returns or somehow encode them so that it works? Thanks so much.

Write all newlines as \n. So,

onclick="displayEditNotesModal('1', 'Hi.\n\nHi again.', 'collegeNotes');"

Okay, that's what I thought, but here's the actual situation. A user inputs some text into a <textarea> and a submit button is pressed. The text is processed using PHP from the $_POST Super Global Variable. How can I detect returns and replace them with \n? I've tried preg_replace(), but to no avail.

I'm not at all sure about this, there is in fact some guessing going on. But as far as I know, the newline character '\n' is in fact a character, just like 'a' or 'b', which just happens to be represented as the two characters \ and n.

Now here's the guessing part. When the php parser finds the \ and n characters together they are parsed as a newline. What you want is the php parser to not parse it as a newline, but just the two characters \ and n, so that that parsing can be done by the javascript instead when you pass it to your function.

Again, just guessing, but perhaps you could replace all '\n' with an escaped backslash, '\\n'. Something like this

PHP Code:

str_replace('\n', '\\n', $your_string); 


Otherwise, perhaps someboy else can shed some light on this

Test for chr(10) and chr(13)

10 is ascii new line
13 is ascii carriage return.

Thank you! I've found an alternate way to do what I wanted, but this will definitely come in handy later.

Would you post the alternate way please. As it may be of use to future readers of this thread.

Oh, it has nothing to do with the actual solution. What I was doing before was allowing a user to edit a block of text using a textarea. However, I was passing the text to the Javascript function displayEditNotesModal(), which would display a modal with a <textarea> element and a save button. The form would then be processed by php. The problem was in passing the text to the modal. Now, however, I simply display the text inside a <textarea> element and added a submit button below. So, no longer a need to open the modal or call the function displayEditNotesModal().