Replace multiple newlines, tabs, and spaces

Question

I want to replace multiple newline characters with one newline character, and multiple spaces with a single space.

I tried preg_replace(\"/\\n\\n+/\", \"\\n\",

Answer 1

I tried all of above, but it didn't work for me. Then I created some long way to resolve that issue...

Before :

echo nl2br($text);

After :

$tempData = nl2br($text);
$tempData = explode("<br />",$tempData);

foreach ($tempData as $val) {
   if(trim($val) != '')
   {
      echo $val."<br />";
   }
}

And it's worked for me.. I wrote here because, if somebody came here to find answer like me.

Answer 2

If you just want to replace multiple tabs with a single tab, use the following code.

preg_replace("/\s{2,}/", "\t", $string);

Answer 3

Try this:

preg_replace("/[\r\n]*/", "\r\n", $text); 

Answer 4

I have dealt with strip_tags function in PHP and had some problems like: after having a linebreak then appear a new line with some spaces and then a new linebreak appear continuously ...etc. without any rule :(.

This is my solution for dealing with strip_tags

Replace multiple spaces to one, multiple linebreaks to single linebreak

function cleanHtml($html)
{
    // Clean code into script tags
    $html = preg_replace('#<script(.*?)>(.*?)</script>#is', '', $html);

    // Clean code into style tags
    $html = preg_replace('/<\s*style.+?<\s*\/\s*style.*?>/si', '', $html );

    // Strip HTML
    $string = trim(strip_tags($html));

    // Replace multiple spaces on each line (keep linebreaks) with single space
    $string = preg_replace("/[[:blank:]]+/", " ", $string); // (*)

    // Replace multiple spaces of all positions (deal with linebreaks) with single linebreak
    $string = preg_replace('/\s{2,}/', "\n", $string); // (**)
    return $string;
}

Keywords are (*) and (**).

Answer 5

In theory, you regular expression does work, but the problem is that not all operating system and browsers send only \n at the end of string. Many will also send a \r.

Try:

I've simplified this one:

preg_replace("/(\r?\n){2,}/", "\n\n", $text);

And to address the problem of some sending \r only:

preg_replace("/[\r\n]{2,}/", "\n\n", $text);

Based on your update:

// Replace multiple (one ore more) line breaks with a single one.
$text = preg_replace("/[\r\n]+/", "\n", $text);

$text = wordwrap($text,120, '<br/>', true);
$text = nl2br($text);

Answer 6

Use \R (which represents any line ending sequence):

$str = preg_replace('#\R+#', '</p><p>', $str);

It was found here: Replacing two new lines with paragraph tags

PHP documentation about Escape sequences:

\R (line break: matches \n, \r and \r\n)