Textarea not pulling line break from database

• 

  • chrispycreme

  • December 16, 2020 at 9:50 am

  Hello,

  I have data with new lines stored in a custom field (_position_title):

  Title1\nTitle2\nTitle3\nTitle4\nTitle5\nTitle6

  It displays fine on the front-end using explode:

  $position_titles =  explode( "\\n", get_field('position_title') );
  foreach ( $position_titles as $pt ):

  However, on the admin Edit Page, it does not convert the line breaks to new lines inside the textarea field that is for editing:

  Title1\nTitle2\nTitle3\nTitle4\nTitle5\nTitle6

  I tried every valid value for new_lines but this seems to only apply to get_field() – not displaying the data in the admin textarea.

   array(
  		'key' => 'field__position_title',
  		'label' => 'Position Title',
  		'name' => '_position_title',
  		'type' => 'textarea',
  		'instructions' => '',
  		'required' => 0,
  		'conditional_logic' => 0,
  		'wrapper' => array(
  		    'width' => '',
  		    'class' => '',
  		    'id' => '',
  		),
  		'default_value' => '',
  		'placeholder' => '',
  		'maxlength' => '',
  		'rows' => '',
  		'new_lines' => '',
  		'readonly' => 0,
  		'disabled' => 0,
  	    ),

  Any idea why the WP admin custom field is not converting \n to new lines inside the textarea? I’m using ACF Pro 5.7.9 and WP 5.4.4.
• 

  

  • John Huebner

  • December 16, 2020 at 11:36 pm

  I don’t understand where you are putting the new lines. Are you typing them into the field? Are they coming from somewhere else?
• 

  • chrispycreme

  • December 17, 2020 at 1:32 am

  Hi John,

  The new lines come from either (a) the textarea custom field in WP admin Edit Page, or (b) added from WPAllImport custom fields (where contacts are imported from a CSV file):

  Screenshot of Edit Page: https://ibb.co/ZGN4ZxT
  Screenshot of WPAllImport: https://ibb.co/LvgNFtM

  I am not trying to put new lines on a front-end page anywhere. It is the back-end Edit Page where I want them converted to new lines inside the textarea for editing (first screenshot).

  Thank you.
• 

  • chrispycreme

  • December 17, 2020 at 4:55 am

  Update: If I re-save the page, the new lines appear correctly in the textarea. I looked in the database and it appears new lines are stored as actual new lines rather than \n. (Screenshot of database: https://ibb.co/p2hRtMK )

  So it looks like the real problem is with the way WP All Import is adding \n rather than a new line. I may need to separate these titles into 6 different fields if there is no way around this. Not an ACF problem after all.
• 

  

  • John Huebner

  • December 17, 2020 at 11:42 pm

  I am not sure about the import, to add returns to a text field in php it would be "\r\n" note the double quotes so that PHP will interpret the string. I do not know what you need to get WPAI to insert the proper characters. I would contact them and ask, their support is usually pretty helpful.