Text Area to HTML [resolved]

I want to put a text area on a page that I am working on, this text area is for the user to put in a message email body, the user types up the message body as plain text but i would like to have it converted to HTML. So that if the user enters 3 paragraphs separted by blank lines, when the text from the textarea get inserted in the email that gets sent out it doesnt look like a big chunk of information but separted into several paragraphs.

Does anyone have any idea of how to do this? Examples would be best.

Thanks to all that reply.

If you send the textarea contents in plain text then you don't need to worry about the line changes being in HTML: from plain text view they are there already. Of course, you can also send the textarea contents in HTML... so do you really need to send as HTML? The easiest you can do is to do replace for line break tag.

You didn't tell which server side language you are using. PHP, JSP, ASP, Perl?

Merri, I am using ASP and sending out an email. But I am hardcoding the header which has an image and some standard text, and also hardcoding the footer, which is a thank you with a few links, I am only allowing the user to enter the body of the html and figured that i need to change from plain text to html, in order to get this accomplished, becuase I am sending an html email. So what you are saying is that i can just drop the plain text into the html and it will work fine?

In this case it won't work as you said you're sending an HTML mail. The easiest replace code would be something like

VB Code:

'note: actually writing as classic VB since it is closest to ASP that I know
   strHTML = Replace(strTextarea, vbLf, "<br>")

vbLf represents the line change character. In PHP and JavaScript you get this with "\n" (if I remember correctly). I don't know if ASP pages are served with CRLF (Windows/DOS style) or just LF (UNIX/Linux style).

A more sophisticated way would be to do multiple replaces so you'd end up with something like this:

HTML Code:

---

<p>Line one.<br>Line two.</p><p>Second paragraph</p>

---

This would just be more correct in context sense, but admittedly harder to code.

Merri,

The text replace worked like a charm, just what I was looking for.

Thanks