latex doesn't display carriage returns from mysql query

Question

In a textarea of an html form I allow multi line inputs such as:

hello

goodbye

This string is then put into a mysql database with mysql_real_escape_string. Now I want to take this string and pass it directly into a tex document, but the empty lines (carriage returns I suppose) are not being output with the string. Hence when this is compiled with latex I get the output

hellornrngoodbye

What do I need to do to my string to retain the carriage returns?

blubb · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-24 21:41:28Z

2

After our discussion in chat, here's what we figured out:

You used

shell_exec("cat ".$PATH."/LatexTemplate.tex | sed -e 's/LatexCode/$latexcode/' > ".$PATH."/TexFiles/Q$id.tex");

inside a PHP script to insert the latex input stored in the DB into a template file and save that. Somewhere in this process, the newlines got dropped.

The best solution would be to replace the shell exec with a PHP equivalent that loads the file into a string, performs a string replacement with the (unescaped) input string and stores it in another file.

edited Jan 24, 2012 at 21:41

answered Jan 24, 2012 at 20:48

blubb

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6 Comments

Geoff Over a year ago

I did try this: $str = str_replace('\r\n','\\',$str); but all I got was this inserted into my tex file: hello\goodbye. Which isn't correct.

blubb Over a year ago

Geoff: That's because you are doing the replace in a language which uses `\` as an escape character. See my edit :)

Geoff Over a year ago

Yes, I tried this too, and in this case it works! BUT Let's say I want to continue with \begin{enumerate} (CR) \item hi (CR) \end{enumerate}, then I get \\ in my tex file before the \item and then that doesn't work. So ideally I would like really an empty space/carriage return parsed into the tex source rather than simulating it with \\.

Geoff Over a year ago

ps: how can I do line breaks in the comments? I hit enter, and the comment is posted!

blubb Over a year ago

@Geoff: I don't follow. Can you edit the original question to include this example?

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