I am trying to do some text manipulation to allow for include statements to be created from a custom tag in a string. I have got it working but I seem to get a strange character at the beginning of the output from the include.
The strange character does not show up on the page (unless I enclose the output in <pre> tags) but is there in the source code, which causes extra spacing between the first two paragraphs. I have included an image of the elusive character as it disappears when I past the source in here.
This is my code:
$val = "This is a bit of text to go before the script.
%SCRIPT(inc.php)%
There should be a bit of text from the inc.php file on its own line above.";
preg_match('/(.*?)%SCRIPT\(([a-z_.-]+)\)%(.*)/s', $val, $match);
array_shift($match);
print_r($match);
echo "<br><hr><br>";
echo "\n<p>";
$match[0] = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\n","\r"), "<br>", $match[0]);
$match[0] = str_replace("<br><br>", "</p>\n", $match[0]);
$match[2] = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\n","\r"), "<br>", $match[2]);
$match[2] = str_replace("<br><br>", "\n<p>", $match[2]);
echo $match[0];
include($match[1]);
echo $match[2];
echo "</p>";
inc.php:
<?php
echo "<p>This is the text in the external file.</p>";
?>
This is the output I get from the script:
This is a bit of text to go before the script.

This is the text in the external file.
There should be a bit of text from the inc.php file on its own line above.
