PHP: Read Textarea Line by Line as Array

With the PHP function explode(), you can separate a text at a character or string and get back an array with all parts.

We can pass a line break with \r\n (CR LF / 0D 0A). It is important that we use the double quotes " instead of the simple quotes '. Otherwise PHP will not evaluate \r\n as a line break but as the four characters \, r, \ and n:

$arr = explode("\r\n", trim($_POST['name_of_textarea']));

for ($i = 0; $i < count($arr); $i++) {
   $line = $arr[$i];
   ...
}

The trim() function removes the whitespace from the front and the back of the text from the textarea before passing it to explode(). This will ensure that spaces and empty lines are removed in front and behind, and that our array does not contain additional empty lines later.

Then we can continue to process our array, for example with iterating over all elements of the array with a for-loop and accessing each element individually with $line = $arr[$i] for example.
Last update on 2022-04-24 | Created on 2018-02-01

The previous answer is incorrect. [The W3C spec](https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_8.html#SEC8.2.1) states that:

> Line breaks, as in multi-line text field values, are represented as CR LF pairs

The modified answer is as follows:

...

$arr = explode("\r\n", trim($_POST['name_of_textarea']));

...
2019-03-05 at 05:22