Textarea into an array or implode?

Question

Say I have a text area, user enters information exactly like styled below:

Ice cream
Chocolate

then submits this information, I want to retrieve the information EXACTLY like so:

Ice cream, Chocolate

Is this the best way to do it:

$arr = explode("\n", $var);
$arr = implode(",", $arr);

When doing it like this, it puts the information out like so:

Ice cream , Chocolate

Note the space after cream, will a simple trim() fix this?

Answer 1

$text = preg_replace("~\s*[\r\n]+~", ', ', $text);

Answer 2

Dont store modified data in db, just store original one so when you present it to user they can edit them easily.

As far as displaying them, when you present output to users' browser use regex as mentioned by zrekms above

$text = preg_replace("~\s*[\r\n]+~", ', ', $text);

Above line is good enough.

Oh BTW for those who want to explode new line but dont know how because they are different on each OS, Instead of doing this...

$arr = explode("\n", $var);
$arr = explode("\r\n", $var);
$arr = explode("\r", $var);

Just use

$arr = explode(PHP_EOL, $var);

PHP_EOL is equivalent to new line char and its OS independent.