I enter Client Case Notes notes in a textarea field on a PHP form. The field is 5 rows deep and 70 chars wide , using the scroll bar to see beyond 5 lines.

After entering notes, I want to echo or print the entire textarea without the scrollbar so that i do File Print to print out the complete notes. The problem is that using Print or Printf of the textarea variable prints a stream all on one line, with no newlines - this is too wide to print out for longer notes.

how can i do this?

You can use nl2br() function to replace newlines to <br /> html tags, and you can force newlines using wordwrap(). For example, if I wanted to display form post data in a container that allowed overflow, I would use the following:

echo nl2br(htmlentities(wordwrap($_POST['textarea'], 70)));

new to me .. thank you

thanks mgraphic,

that works just fine - I can even specify the font type and size in the statement.

just curious - is there any way to print directly from PHP to a specific printer? my process is two steps - display with echo or print, then File Print from the Explorer toolbar.

thanks again for the tip.

Originally Posted by PeteLB

just curious - is there any way to print directly from PHP to a specific printer? my process is two steps - display with echo or print, then File Print from the Explorer toolbar.

No, that can only be done using Javascript (and I don't think it's possible to specify the printer for the user, only just open the print dialog window).