Flash Forms and ParagraphFormat

December 5, 2006 coldfusion

(This post is more than 2 years old.)

A user recently sent in this problem: They noticed that if they paragraphFormatted the result of an HTML textarea, they got nicely formatted results. If they did the same thing with a Flash Form textarea, it didn't work.

The paragraphFormat function is relying on particular character codes to represent the end of a line. I did a quick test where I replaced all chr(13) with 13s, and all chr(10) with 10s. Turns out on the HTML form, my line breaks were chr(13)chr(10). In the Flash Form, they were just chr(13).

I suggested this simple fix:


<cfset form.comments2 = replace(form.comments, chr(13), chr(13) & chr(10), "all")>

And it seemed to do the trick. One word of warning - if I remember right, the character codes you get from a text area are both OS and browser dependent. This is probably less an issue with Flash Forms however.

I write these posts for free — if they're useful to you, you can buy me a coffee. It helps more than you'd think.

p.s. One more reason to not use Flash Forms and just pick up Flex 2. :)