Remove Extra New Lines?

[rivka]

I'm including files in a textarea, and use strip_tags to strip out any tags I don't want to be included. The thing is, it puts a blank line wherever those tags would have been, and so I have some really big spacing (multiple lines of line breaks) where I'd rather not. Is there a way I could replace any multiple occurrences of line breaks (say anything more than two line breaks together) with just two line breaks total? I.e. two line breaks are acceptable, because that usually prints nice spacing for paragraphs and the like, but anything more than that is too much, and I want it trimmed down to just two. Can anyone point me in the right direction or give some example code to work with?

[xblue]

first thing that comes to my mind are regular expression.

let's see, linebreaks may either be \r\n or \r or \n depending on OS. if it is predictable for you which one will it be, things should be easier, but this catches all 3:

$content=preg_replace('/(\r\n|[\r\n]){3,}/', "$1$1", $content);

but it would not work if there are tabs or spaces on the "blank" lines, so you might prefer:

$content=preg_replace('/((\r\n|[\r\n])(\s| )*?){3,}/', "$2$2", $content);

this is just one way, there may be others, maybe easier than this and I just didn't think of it.