String of Carriage Returns

d-woo

How would I filter content for a string of 2 or more carriage returns and delete them?

My challenge is that the data would be entered in a PHP form and the line breaks would be on separate lines such as

and not

[deleted]

So you don't want to delete any linebreaks, you just want to make sure that every BR tag is followed by a newline?

echo '<pre>';
$sString = "hello this\n \n is a string";
echo htmlspecialchars($sString);
$sString = preg_replace("/ \n/", ' ', $sString);
$sString = preg_replace("/ /", " \n", $sString);
echo '</pre>';
echo 'Replaced by:';
echo '<pre>';
echo htmlspecialchars($sString);
echo '</pre>';

A forum, a FAQ, what else do you need?

Time to YAPF!: http://www.hvt-automation.nl/yapf/

d-woo

Thanks Vinny:

Actually what I want to do is prevent people from hitting "Return" 50 or so times and leaving fifty
 
 
.
.
.
 in my database (hence also in my guestbook)

I would like to filter the out after more than two and make them as though they hit only once.

[deleted]

hmm looks like this forum is worse than I thought, you can't even put a PRE tag in it without it being parsed.

try this:

$sString = "hello this\n \n is a string";
echo htmlspecialchars($sString);
$sString = preg_replace("/ \n/", ' ', $sString);
$sString = preg_replace("/( ){2,}/", " \n", $sString);
echo ' Replaced by: ';
echo htmlspecialchars($sString);

A forum, a FAQ, what else do you need?

Time to YAPF!: http://www.hvt-automation.nl/yapf/

d-woo

Thanks Vincent.

Question:

The single quotes on line 3 of your code
' ' was that intentional?

d-woo

Thanks Vincent for your insight. I forgot about the carriage return (backslash r) that precedes the next line (backslash n). T

That was the key...they come in pairs.

Here is the code that solved the problem.
$stringtest = ereg_replace("((\r\n){3,})", "\n\n", $stringtest);

replace newline to

$stringtest = ereg_replace("\n", " ", $stringtest);

3 or more pairs of carriage returns and newlines constitutes a double carriage return.

This is needed in order to filter the information prior to going to the MYSQL database...fresh off of the form.

Thanks again Vincent...hope this helps someone in the future.