parsing white space to &lt;br/&gt;

parsing white space to

stew

hey this should be an easy one...

a program outputs some text which includes linebreaks, white space, mixed in amongst the text... I want to replace these characters with appropriate XHTML tags, such as \n to and \s to  
etc... Is there a function in the core php that does this?

oh and i've tried str_replace("\n", ,$string); and it didn't work!

MikeSnead

For the line breaks... nl2br() should do what you want. However, the str_replace function you have shown should have also worked (but you might need to replace the "\r" with as well too.

thorpe

plus you have a typo. the 2nd perameter of str_replace() is a string. so....

str_replace("\n","<br/>",$string);

would do it.

stew

yeah you'd think it would do it, but it didn't...

is there any other characters that would result in a new line?

oh and matching "\s" (to be replaced by " " didn't work either!

Weedpacket

Now for the obvious question: What do you mean "it doesn't work"? How are you using it? What were the results? Like everyone has said up until now str_replace("\n", " ", $string); would replace newline characters with linebreak tags.

MikeSnead

Hmmm... are you setting the return of the str_replace() call back to the string you're manipulating? As in:


$string = str_replace("\n",'<br/>',$string);

not just:


str_replace("\n",'<br/>',$string);