https://shkspr.mobi/blog Regular nonsense about tech and its effects 🙃 Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:18:28 +0000 en-GB © Terence Eden. 🄯 CC BY-SA. See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/copyright-and-copyleft/ hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.4 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cropped-avatar-32x32.jpeg https://shkspr.mobi/blog 32 32 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/02/twitter-and-linebreaks/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/02/twitter-and-linebreaks/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:45:21 +0000 http://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=1642 <p>As any student of computer science knows, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline">line breaks are confusing</a>. There are styles of line breaks unique to Unix, Mac and Windows - so what should a web renderer do when faced with a newline command? In HTML, it's simple, they should be ignored. But what when it is user generated text, not HTML?</p> <p>This was a problem I faced when trying to get Dabr to render the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art">ASCII art</a><sup id="fnref:ascii"><a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/02/twitter-and-linebreaks/#fn:ascii" class="footnote-ref" title="Technically, Unicode Art. But that doesn't have the same ring to it." role="doc-noteref">0</a></sup> produced by <a href="http://aralbalkan.com/">Aral Balkan</a>'s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100215193137/https://feathersapp.com/">Feathers App</a>. Feathers uses line breaks to achieve images like...</p> <pre>〰❀❃ Introducing ❃❀〰 My new iPhone app, ░░░▒█ Feathers █▒░░░ </pre> <p>What's confusing to me, as a developer is the inconsistent way Twitter handles line breaks. For example...</p> <p>Twitter's website ignores line breaks.</p> <p></p><div id="attachment_1643-2" style="width: 410px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1643-2" class="size-full wp-image-1643" title="Desktop Spacing" src="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Desktop-Spacing.png" alt="Desktop Spacing" width="400" height="178"><p id="caption-attachment-1643-2" class="wp-caption-text">Desktop Spacing</p></div><p></p> <p>Twitter Mobile, however, does line breaking correctly.</p> <p></p><div id="attachment_1644-2" style="width: 330px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1644-2" class="size-full wp-image-1644" title="Android Spacing" src="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Android-Spacing.png" alt="Android Spacing" width="320" height="480"><p id="caption-attachment-1644-2" class="wp-caption-text">Android Spacing</p></div><p></p> <p>Twitter has no style guide for rendering and - if it did - appears to render inconsistently. So, what's the correct thing to do?</p> <p>In my opinion, <strong>respect the user</strong>. If a user has indicted that they want something, it is a developer's role to implement it (unless it causes severe problems for the system).</p> <h2 id="how-to-achieve-it"><a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/02/twitter-and-linebreaks/#how-to-achieve-it">How to achieve it?</a></h2> <p>You could use all sorts of complex regular expressions to get line breaks and convert them. Thankfully, PHP has this function built in with <a href="http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php">nl2br()</a> which will give you (X)HTML line breaks wherever a break occurs in the text.</p> <div id="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> <hr aria-label="Footnotes"> <ol start="0"> <li id="fn:ascii"> <p>Technically, Unicode Art. But that doesn't have the same ring to it.&nbsp;<a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/02/twitter-and-linebreaks/#fnref:ascii" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> <img src="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=1642&amp;HTTP_REFERER=RSS" alt="" width="1" height="1" loading="eager"> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/02/twitter-and-linebreaks/feed/ 6