making lots of line breaks into one

exolution

So I've made a comments system, where users can comment on news items. When they comment, all line breaks are turned into with n12br. As it is, users can have as many line breaks as they want, and they can potentially fill up the whole page. What I want to accomplish is to have mass line breaks made into one. I've tried this, but it's not doing it. Here's my code.

$comment = str_replace ("\n \n", "\n",  ($comment));
$comment = str_replace ("\n", '', nl2br ($comment));
$comment = trim ($comment);

This succesfully gets rid of whitespace before and after the comment with trim, but users can still do as many line breaks as they want. If you've got a solution, please respond.

jpmoriarty

surely your second line doesnt actually do anything? the nl2br function will replace all the \n's with 's, so if you attempt to replace the \n's in that string then there wont be any (they'll already have been converted to 's.

I wonder would it be possible to do something using strtok() maybe? It's just an idea, but you could try something along these lines:

   $token = strtok($comment, "\n");
   $clean_comment = $token."<br>";
   while ($token!="")
   {
     $token = strtok("\n");
     if(trim($token)==""){}
     else
     $clean_comment = $clean_comment.$token."<br>";
   }
   echo $clean_comment;

i think that will let you add returns, but wont allow more than one at a time, which might be what you're after - remember of course that if you use and 's then you'll get a nicer "gap" between the lines.

Hope that helps - a nice little tricky one!

spirp

One way to remove multiple linebreaks is to use the preg_replace function like this:

$formated_string = preg_replace("/\n{2,}/", "\n\n", $input_string);

the regular expression above matches linebreaks (two or more) and replaces them with two linebreaks.

Good luck,
Olle