New line ("\n") in PHP is not working

When you run a PHP script in a browser, it will be rendered as HTML by default. If the books you’re using show otherwise, then either the code or the illustration is inaccurate. You can use “view source” to view what was sent to the browser and you’ll see that your line feeds are present.

<?php
echo "Line 1\nLine 2";
?>

This will render in your browser as:

Line 1 Line 2

If you need to send plain text to your browser, you can use something like:

<?php
header('Content-type: text/plain');
echo "Line 1\nLine 2";
?>

This will output:

Line 1
Line 2

PHP Linefeeds (\n) Not Working is referring to sending output to a file rather than the browser.

You should be looking for nl2br(). This will add line breaks (<br>) to your output which will be rendered by the browser; newlines are not.

The echo "\n" is probably working, just not the way you expect it to.

That command will insert a new line character. From the sounds of it, you're using a browser to view your output. Note that if you wrote an HTML file that had a body contents that looked like:

<p>This
is
a
test </p>

The browser rendering would not include the new lines, and would instead just show "This is a test"

If you want to see the newlines, you could view source, and you'll see that the source code includes the new lines.

The rule of thumb is that if you need new lines in a browser, you need to use HTML (e.g. <br />), while if you want it in plain text, you can use the \n