Problem when uploading text with paragraphs

["Catalin :: Braescu" <ca...@edison.ro>]

I am not the developer but rather the internal client who asks a colleague
developer deliver some feature and the developer can't find the solution.

Anyway, we have a blog application written in Struts. The user inputs some
text, consisting of more than one paragraph. The submit is done using
textarea from Struts, not from HTML (I can't explain better, I am not the
developer, but I am sure you understand what I mean). Unfortunately at this
stage all formating of text (most important paragraph markings) is cleared
away; within Mysql the text is one single chunk.

There must be a solution to upload text corectly into a database using
Struts, so if there are any paragraphs they are preserved during submit. Any
hints?

With many thanks in advance for absolutely any help,


Catalin

--
Catalin Braescu
Scuba.ro
Bucharest - ROMANIA (Europe)




---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: struts-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: struts-user-help@jakarta.apache.org

Re: Problem when uploading text with paragraphs

[Jason Lea <ja...@kumachan.net.nz>]

This probably isn't a struts problem if I am guessing correctly...

I assume that the problem is you enter text into the textarea and have 
several new lines eg

    paragraph number 1 with some text that might wrap at the edge of the 
textarea
    paragraph number 2 with some different text
    paragraph number 3 to end the textarea

This gets stored in MySql, but when the text is redisplayed on the HTML 
page it appears like this:

    paragraph number 1 with some text that might wrap at the edge of the 
textarea paragraph number 2 with some different text paragraph number 3 
to end the textarea

eg missing the line breaks.

To fix this the developer needs to do a search and replace on the text 
looking for /n (the newline character) and replacing it with <br/> the 
html line break.

You only want to do this when displaying the text, not when you put it 
into the database.  If you wanted to edit this text again it would have 
<br/> tags instead of newlines which would look bad.  Also if you use 
something like <bean:write> to write out the text it will try to escape 
the characters, meaning the <br/> will change into &lt;br/&gt; and not 
work as line breaks.

I use this taglib 
http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/doc/string-doc/intro.html for doing 
the replace in the JSP page after the html has been escaped.  I use it 
with JSTL eg

    <str:replace replace="NL" with="<br>NL" newlineToken="NL"><c:out 
value="${content}" /></str:replace>

but you might be able to use it like this (if using struts tags):

    <str:replace replace="NL" with="<br>NL" 
newlineToken="NL"><bean:write name="content" /></str:replace>


Catalin :: Braescu wrote:

>I am not the developer but rather the internal client who asks a colleague
>developer deliver some feature and the developer can't find the solution.
>
>Anyway, we have a blog application written in Struts. The user inputs some
>text, consisting of more than one paragraph. The submit is done using
>textarea from Struts, not from HTML (I can't explain better, I am not the
>developer, but I am sure you understand what I mean). Unfortunately at this
>stage all formating of text (most important paragraph markings) is cleared
>away; within Mysql the text is one single chunk.
>
>There must be a solution to upload text corectly into a database using
>Struts, so if there are any paragraphs they are preserved during submit. Any
>hints?
>
>With many thanks in advance for absolutely any help,
>
>
>Catalin
>
>--
>Catalin Braescu
>Scuba.ro
>Bucharest - ROMANIA (Europe)
>
>
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>To unsubscribe, e-mail: struts-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
>For additional commands, e-mail: struts-user-help@jakarta.apache.org
>
>
>  
>


-- 
Jason Lea




---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: struts-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: struts-user-help@jakarta.apache.org