CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlreplaceline-breaksnl2br
Johannes P.
Johannes P.

Reputation: 4123

How to remove line breaks (no characters!) from the string?

This might appear to be a dupe, but rest assured it isn't - I have searched both SO as well as the rest of the web for an answer to my problem and ended up finding the same insufficient "solutions" over and over. Anyhow, here it goes:

I'm saving user input from a textarea to a MySQL database (within a WordPress environment, but that ought not to matter to this problem, I believe). It is later retrieved from the DB to be shown to Admins in the backend of the site. The problem occurs when users submit text with line breaks (i.e. hit the Enter key).

A sample string might look like this:

Dear friends, I just wanted so Hello. How are you guys? I'm fine, thanks!

Greetings,
Bill

There are no end of line characters ("\n", "\r", or the like) in the string.

I am using nl2br() on it to generate HTML output, but that's not enough. The result then is:

Dear friends, I just wanted so Hello. How are you guys? I'm fine, thanks!<br />
<br />
Greetings,<br />
Bill

Which, as far as I understand it, is the expected nl2br() result, as that inserts the tags and isn't supposed to replace the line-breaks in the first place?

However the format I need would be this:

Dear friends, I just wanted so Hello. How are you guys? I'm fine, thanks!<br /><br />Greetings,<br />Bill

If the string had EOL characters such as "\n" in it, I'd hit it with either str_replace() or preg_replace() and be done with it, but I have no clue what needle to feed either of those functions if there ain't no characters there in the first place.

I can manually access the relevant field in the DB, hit Backspace for every linebreak and what I later on want to do with the string works. So I know I need the above format.

Upvotes: 200

Views: 429013

Answers (16)

user25700573
user25700573

Reputation: 1

In my experience this problem is not in the replacing of characters but in understanding how HTML works. That is; my experience and my understanding. If you get an input string from a textarea an you have to save it in a db, you have to escape the "\r" and "\n" (and more characters) before you save it in a MySQL/MariaDB database with something like:

public static function EscapeMySQL(array $arrInput):array{
    foreach($arrInput as $key=>$value){
        if(!empty($value) AND is_string($value)){
            $arrInput[$key]=str_replace('<br/>','\r', $value);
            $arrInput[$key]=str_replace(array('\\',"\0","\n","\r","'",'"','`',"\x1a"),array('\\\\','\\0','\\n','\\r',"\\'",'\\"','\\`','\\Z'),$value);
        }
    }
    return $arrInput;
}

But if you retrieve the data and put it in a textarea, you can just put is there. Texarea will interpret "\n" and or "\r" as in notepad or so (a linebreak). However if you put the text directly in a div or so you have to use the nl2br function.

Upvotes: 0

mickmackusa
mickmackusa

Reputation: 47883

The best, most direct, operating system agnostic approach is to avoid calling nl2br() entirely and just replace newline sequences with <br /> tags.

Escape Sequences:

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

\R is equivalent to (?>\r\n|\n|\r|\f|\x0b|\x85).

Code: (Demo)

$html = <<<HTML
Dear friends, I just wanted so Hello. How are you guys? I'm fine, thanks!

Greetings,
Bill
HTML;

echo preg_replace('/\R/', '<br />', $html);

Output (exactly as desired, in one step):

Dear friends, I just wanted so Hello. How are you guys? I'm fine, thanks!<br /><br />Greetings,</ br>Bill

Upvotes: 1

Muhammad Hamza Ehsan
Muhammad Hamza Ehsan

Reputation: 47

Use this code to replace \r\n

str_ireplace(array("\r","\n",'\r','\n'),'', $row['smalldescp']);

Upvotes: -2

TedCampos
TedCampos

Reputation: 15

after trying literally all of these solutions.. the only thing that worked was to (urlencode - then replace - then urldecode)

$jsonDump = urlencode($jsonDump);
$jsonDump = str_replace("%5Cr","",$jsonDump);
$jsonDump = str_replace("%5Cn","",$jsonDump);
$jsonDump = urldecode($jsonDump);

Upvotes: -1

tfont
tfont

Reputation: 11233

Something a bit more functional (easy to use anywhere):

function strip_carriage_returns($string)
{
    return str_replace(["\n\r", "\n", "\r"], '', $string);
}

Using PHP_EOL as the search replacement parameter is also a good idea! Kudos.

Upvotes: 12

Ajjaah
Ajjaah

Reputation: 171

To work properly also on Windows I'd suggest to use

$buffer = str_replace(["\r\n", "\r", "\n"], "", $buffer);

"\r\n" - for Windows, "\r" - for Mac and "\n" - for Linux

Upvotes: 13

kenorb
kenorb

Reputation: 166359

It's because nl2br() doesn't remove new lines at all.

Returns string with <br /> or <br> inserted before all newlines (\r\n, \n\r, \n and \r).

Use str_replace instead:

$string = str_replace(["\r\n", "\r", "\n"], "<br />", $string);

Upvotes: 15

Shubham Dange
Shubham Dange

Reputation: 182

I think my answer is too late but I got same extra line issue while using it in JS script, but it works like this

This will add <br /> and line breaks in string.

$text = nl2br($text);

This line will remove extra line.

$text = preg_replace("/\r|\n/", "", $text);

Replacing <br /> with any unwanted common symbol like this asterisk ** while inserting in DB:

$text = str_replace("<br />","**",$text );

And when I want to use it in program that time I use it replacing **.

$text = str_replace("**","\\n",$text );

Then use $text in program

Upvotes: 2

Chirag
Chirag

Reputation: 107

You can use preg_replace in order to replace parts of a string matching a regular expression, like:

preg_replace("/\s+/","",$string);

Upvotes: -1

Sergio Mcfly PYK
Sergio Mcfly PYK

Reputation: 4291

I use 3 lines to do this job, so consider $s as your "stuff"...

$s=str_replace(chr(10),'',$s);
$s=str_replace(chr(13),'',$s);
$s=str_replace("\r\n"),'',$s);
  • Legend:

chr(10)___a line feed

chr(13)___the return

\r\n______a new line

Upvotes: 1

NVRM
NVRM

Reputation: 13067

Alternative built-in: trim()

trim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning and end of a string
Description ¶
trim ( string $str [, string $character_mask = " \t\n\r\0\x0B" ] ) : string

This function returns a string with whitespace stripped from the beginning and end of str.
Without the second parameter, trim() will strip these characters:

    " " (ASCII 32 (0x20)), an ordinary space.
    "\t" (ASCII 9 (0x09)), a tab.
    "\n" (ASCII 10 (0x0A)), a new line (line feed).
    "\r" (ASCII 13 (0x0D)), a carriage return.
    "\0" (ASCII 0 (0x00)), the NUL-byte.
    "\x0B" (ASCII 11 (0x0B)), a vertical tab.

It's there to remove line breaks from different kinds of text files, but does not handle html.

Upvotes: 0

Ben Roux
Ben Roux

Reputation: 7426

You should be able to replace it with a preg that removes all newlines and carriage returns. The code is:

preg_replace( "/\r|\n/", "", $yourString );

Even though the \n characters are not appearing, if you are getting carriage returns there is an invisible character there. The preg replace should grab and fix those.

Upvotes: 445

Gijs de Jong
Gijs de Jong

Reputation: 1027

You can also use PHP trim

This function returns a string with whitespace stripped from the beginning and end of str. Without the second parameter, trim() will strip these characters:

  • " " (ASCII 32 (0x20)), an ordinary space.
  • "\t" (ASCII 9 (0x09)), a tab.
  • "\n" (ASCII 10 (0x0A)), a new line (line feed).
  • "\r" (ASCII 13 (0x0D)), a carriage return.
  • "\0" (ASCII 0 (0x00)), the NUL-byte.
  • "\x0B" (ASCII 11 (0x0B)), a vertical tab.

Upvotes: 8

Demis Palma ツ
Demis Palma ツ

Reputation: 8037

Ben's solution is acceptable, but str_replace() is by far faster than preg_replace()

$buffer = str_replace(array("\r", "\n"), '', $buffer);

Using less CPU power, reduces the world carbon dioxide emissions.

Upvotes: 611

Rafanake
Rafanake

Reputation: 77

str_replace(PHP_EOL, null, $str);

Upvotes: 11

flowfree
flowfree

Reputation: 16462

$str = "
Dear friends, I just wanted so Hello. How are you guys? I'm fine, thanks!<br />
<br />
Greetings,<br />
Bill";

echo str_replace(array("\n", "\r"), '', $str);  // echo $str in a single line

Upvotes: 19

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