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How to Properly Handle Line Breaks When Using quoted_printable_decode in PHP to Avoid Formatting Issues

gitbox 2025-07-17 
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<p><h1>How to Properly Handle Line Breaks When Using quoted_printable_decode in PHP to Avoid Formatting Issues</h1></p>
<p><p>When processing email content or data that uses <code>quoted-printable

In this case, if the line breaks in $decoded are CRLF, certain browsers or environments may not recognize them correctly, causing the text to appear in a single line or misaligned.

5. How to Correctly Handle Line Breaks

To avoid issues caused by inconsistent line breaks, it's recommended to standardize them. The most common practice is to convert all line breaks to Unix-style line breaks, i.e., \n. Here’s an example:

</span><span><span>$decoded</span></span><span> = </span><span><span class="function_ invoke__">quoted_printable_decode</span></span><span>(</span><span><span>$encoded</span></span><span>);

</span><span><span>// Replace all CRLF (\r\n) and CR (\r) line breaks with LF (\n)</span></span><span>
</span><span><span>$normalized</span></span><span> = </span><span><span class="function_ invoke__">str_replace</span></span><span>([</span><span><span>"\r\n"</span></span><span>, </span><span><span>"\r"</span></span><span>], </span><span><span>"\n"</span></span><span>, </span><span><span>$decoded</span></span><span>);

</span><span><span>// If HTML line breaks are needed, use nl2br</span></span><span>
</span><span><span>echo</span></span><span> </span><span><span class="function_ invoke__">nl2br</span></span><span>(</span><span><span class="function_ invoke__">htmlspecialchars</span></span><span>(</span><span><span>$normalized</span></span><span>));

6. Conclusion

  • After using quoted_printable_decode(), line breaks might be in CRLF or CR formats.
  • To avoid formatting issues, it's recommended to replace all line breaks with LF (\n).
  • When displaying HTML, using nl2br() and htmlspecialchars() together ensures both proper formatting and security.

By following the above methods, you can effectively prevent line break-related formatting issues when using quoted_printable_decode(), ensuring the content is displayed clearly and consistently.

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