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.