[Resolved] preg_replace: Expression problem

leatherback

Hi,

In a script to adjust user-inputted text to html text, I am looking for a way to insert paragraphs properly.
I now replace all linebreaks with <br /> through nl2br. From there I g to </p><p> by matching double <br /> in the text.
Now i have the problem that there might be a lot of -newlines- in a text. I do not want to convert them all into paragraph breaks. So if there is a double set,I would like to replace them by a single, across linebreaks. Here is what I have, but it doesn't do anything like I was hoping for..

 $uittext = preg_replace('/(\<(\/?)p\>\s*){4,}/msi', '</p><p>', $uittext);

Can somebody lend me a hand here?

Thanks!

laserlight

This might do the trick:

$str = preg_replace('/(\<br \/\>){2,}/', '</p><p>', $str);

Not sure if this might be better in the event that you want to apply nl2br() as well:

$str = preg_replace('/[\r\n]{2,}/', '</p><p>', $str);
$str = nl2br($str);

You'll also have to take care of the starting and ending paragraph tags.

leatherback

Got it to work, and added linebreaks to it:

 $uittext = preg_replace('/(\s*(\<br \/>){0,}\s*\<(\/?)p\>\s*){4,}/msi', '</p><p>', $uittext);

leatherback

Hi Laser,

thx for your reply.

The reason I am not directly converting linebreaks tp paragraph breaks has to do with my script which checks for list elements, which I really do not want to rewrite, since it took me days to get it to work properly..

The starting & ending of paragraphs is taken care of: i check for header tags, replace the end header to include start paragraphs. The end of the inserted text is ended with a close paragraphs. Then I run this snippet over, to remove any duplicates which may occur.

Thx again,

Jelle.