Escaping HTML – br tag

• spinline

• September 3, 2015 at 7:08 am

I have a sub field I’m trying to translate to a string so it can return a url that Google Maps understands.

<?php $address = get_sub_field('address');
<a href="//www.google.com/maps/place/<?php echo $address; ?>">Get directions</a>

The problem is my ACF field is a textarea with <br />, so my string looks like this:
http://www.google.com/maps/place/23 Someplace Dr<br />Suite D<br />New Haven, CT <br />06501

Google Maps will “translate” spaces and commas as is, but not <br />.

I tried this, which does not work: <a href="//www.google.com/maps/place/<?php echo esc_html($address); ?>">Get directions</a>

Any ideas?

• John Huebner

• September 4, 2015 at 5:53 am

If you don’t need the <br> tags to display the address then change the format of the textarea to “No Formatting”. If you do need the breaks then you’ll need to do a string replace to remove them. Something like

$address = str_replace('<br />', ', ', $address);

I’d probably also make it a proper query value with

$address = urlencode($address);