Help with Regular Expressions

[Anon]

I am passing a table like so in a textbox:

<TABLE ALIGN='left' BORDER='1'>
<TR VALIGN='middle' ALIGN='left'>
<TD>111</TD>
<TD>222</TD>
</TR>
<TR VALIGN='middle' ALIGN='left'>
<TD>333</TD>
<TD>444</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

I then want to display this table - but since ther is other information in the form, I want to convert all carriage returns to break tags (nl2br). So once that is done, the html returned looks something like:

<TABLE ALIGN='left' BORDER='1'>
<BR>
<TR VALIGN='middle' ALIGN='left'>
<BR>
<TD>111</TD>
<BR>
<TD>222</TD>
<BR>
</TR>
<BR>
<TR VALIGN='middle' ALIGN='left'>
<BR>
<TD>333</TD>
<BR>
<TD>444</TD>
<BR>
</TR>
<BR>
</TABLE>
<BR>

I can get rid of the break tags following any of the colsing tags - but how can I get rid of the items following the opening tags )(TR AND TABLE) ? I know it has to do w/ regular expressions. But I went over the tutorials and am still stumped. could anyone post the code that looks for a TR tag followed by a carriage return and a <BR> and replaces it with just the TR tag minus the BR and carriage return?

Thanks a lot.

[rogair]

You could just do a simple string replace. Replacing all ><br>< with ><. I think in this case that would take care of it.

[Anon]

Thanks but it won't work - because I need the <BR> tags in other locations. For example, when I am writing this in the textarea...

I can hit enter, and they (the carriage returns) are translated to <BR> tags later on (presumably with the nl2br function.) which is what I want. But then if I want to include a table below the <BR> tags that come after I enter <TABLE width='100%'> (Carriage return) - are the ones I want to have removed - because if I don't then they blank spaces will appear ABOVE the table... and mess up any of the other text entered in the textarea

[rogair]

That's why I suggested using the string ><br>< replaced with ><. because it will then only replace <BR> tags that are surrounded by other HTML tags. If you have HREFS followed by line breaks it might not work in all cases but if it's just table formatting it should work. eg

<table><br><tr><br><td>blah blah blah<br>blah<br>blah<br></td><br></tr><br></table>

will be replaced with
<table><tr><td>blah blah blah<br>blah<br></td></tr></table>

If there are cases that you will need to keep some <BR> with other tags then you will indeed need to use regexp.

Try here
http://www.regexsite.com/

I haven't visited in a long time so don't know what state it's in. It was built by another PHPBuilder visitor