I've looked and looked-- and everything I read says that "\r" is supposed to generate a return. But it doesn't. I've tried everything I can think of.

I've been programming for 20 years. It feels silly to ask such a question. Though-- I'm just getting started with PHP.

Here's some sample code. Thanks

<?php
$cars[0]="Saab";
$cars[1]="Volvo";
$cars[2]="BMW";
$cars[3]="Toyota";
echo $cars[0] . " and " . $cars[1] . " are Swedish cars.\r";

$ages['Peter'] = "32";
$ages['Quagmire'] = "30";
$ages['Joe'] = "34";
echo "Peter is " . $ages['Peter'] . " years old.";
?>

Using the HTML, <br /> instead of the "\r" seems to work--

so-- when do you use the "\r" for return or the "\n for new line?

We all have to start somewhere with a new language

The problem you have here isn't actually PHP related, but HTML.

Both \r and \n work as you'd expect in PHP itself, for example, from a console window, try:



and you'll get:



Same as if you run a PHP script a non-web environment.

HTML however, requires tags rather than escape codes, and that's why '<br />' works for you there rather than a \n or \r.

I assume you're running the code in a web environment, and although you're echoing data from PHP, it's actually being rendered by the HTML engine.

If you really want to use \r or \n in a web environment, you'll need to either wrap the 'echo' statement(s) in <pre></pre> tags, or define a text content type ( header('Content-type: text/plain'); ). Different situations / results that you're looking for would depend on what method was actually required, but if you're looking to generate HTML output, just continue with the '<br />' tag and all will be well

Just FWIW.. PHP also comes with a 'nl2br()' function that will convert newline codes to '<br />' tags. Useful when reading plain text in to display as HTML (for example, a basic news article stored in a database with no HTML tags or parsing a plain text document etc).

HTH



Regards,

Ian