Preserve Line Breaks - Simple HTML DOM Parser

Question

When using PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser, is it normal that line breaks
tags are stripped out?

Answer 1

If you were passing by here wondering if you can do the same thing in DomDocument then I'm please to say you can! - but it's a bit dirty :(

I had a snippet of code I wanted to tidy but retain the exact line breaks it contained (\n). This is what I did....

// NOTE: If you're HTML isn't a full HTML document then expect DomDocument to
// start creating its own DOCTYPE, head and body tags.


// Convert \n into a pretend tag
$myContent = preg_replace("/[\n]/","",$myContent);

// Do your DOM stuff...
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($myContent);
$dom->formatOutput = true;

$myContent = $dom->saveHTML();

// Remove the \n's that DOMDocument put in itself
$myContent = preg_replace("/[\n]/","",$myContent);

// Put my own \n's back
$myContent = preg_replace("//i","\n",$myContent);

It's important to note that I know, without a shadow of a doubt that my input contained only \n. You may want your own variations if \r\n or \t needs to be accounted for. eg slash.T or slash.RN etc