Newbie exploding text from MySQL

it is the little things that we assume everyone knows

[Storyman]

Developement Program: Dreamweaver MX 2004

Using a text field input lines of text are typed, using a carriage return to break the lines on input.

The text is stored in a MySQL text field.

When retrieved the goal is to make the lines of text format as a bulleted unordered list.

This is the bit of code that I'm working with now:
<?php
if (!empty($row_rsHomePage['mt_list'])) {
$thelist = ($row_rsHomePage['mt_list']);
$newlist = explode('/n', $thelist);
echo "$newlist[0]<br />";
echo "$newlist[1]";
}?>

Right now I'm unable to explode the list because I'm don't know what the delimiter is that separates the lines (/n is not it).

What delimiter should I use so explode will break the lines?

From here the plan is to count the number of arrays, then echo each array with a dot and space preceding it. Is there a better way to do this?

[Birdman]

Hello,

The line break could be either \r or \n(or both I believe). I would suggest an if/else to check which one exists. I wrote a one-liner below. It may look confusing but it's just a shorthand version(ternary, I believe) of an if/else statement.

$newlist = (strpos('\r', $thelist) === false)? explode('/n', $thelist) : explode('\r', $thelist);

And a quick way to put the in list format using a foreach loop:

$list = '<ul>';
foreach($newlist as $val){
$list .= '<li>'.$val.'</li>';
}
$list .= '</ul>';

print $list;

Hope it helps,
Birdman

[Storyman]

Birdman,

Since posting I came up with a solution, but I like your's better. Thanks for the solution.

<?php
if (!empty($row_rsHomePage['mt_list'])) {
$thelist = nl2br($row_rsHomePage['mt_list']);
$newlist = explode('<br />', $thelist);
$i = 0; $n = count($newlist)-1;
while ($i < $n) {
echo "<ul><li>$newlist[$i]</li></ul>";
$i++;
}
}?>

[Storyman]

Discovered that my code works fine in IE6, but makes monkey shines in FireFox. In FF the <ul> tag is handled differently and creates an extra bullet to the left of the item list.

Using Birdman's approach I've changed to the code so it works in both IE and FF just fine:

<?php
if (!empty($row_rsHomePage['para_1_list'])) {
$readylist = '';
$thelist = nl2br(trim($row_rsHomePage['para_1_list']));
$newlist = explode('<br />', $thelist);
foreach($newlist as $val) {
$readylist .= "<li>$val</li>";
}
echo "<ul>$readylist</ul>";
}
?>

Just in case anyone is interested in the CSS code:

#content ul {
list-style-position: outside;
list-style-type: disc;
padding-left: 5px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-left: 180px;
margin-right: 10px;
}