remove empty lines and convert into single space php

Question

I have a data in mysql table:

<p>aaaa</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>asd</p>

and I need to display it like this:

aaaa asd

But I can't seem to get it right.

First I'm using this code:

$string = htmlspecialchars_decode(stripslashes($string)); // $string contains data from the table

and I tried this: (from here)

$string = trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $string));

and also this: (from here)

$string = str_replace(array("\n", "\r"), '', $string);

but nothing works! when I use echo $string; it still shows an empty line. can anyone give a solution?

@Ravenix what do you mean? I thought \s+ means "one or more new line"? — dapidmini, Nov 30 '16 at 08:25
Do you want to keep the `
` tags? Those are causing the line breaks. — simon, Nov 30 '16 at 08:26
@DevNiels yes, I just tried it after you suggested it, but still the same result.. — dapidmini, Nov 30 '16 at 08:27
@simon no, I don't want any empty lines. all empty lines was supposed to be replaced with a single space — dapidmini, Nov 30 '16 at 08:27
From your example, It sounds like you just want to rip off all of the

Tags in your "string" and then maybe wrap the whole lot up in paragraph tags once that is done... — TimBrownlaw, Nov 30 '16 at 08:31
I think this answer can solve your problem http://stackoverflow.com/a/16809389/3615630 — Mohammad Alabed, Nov 30 '16 at 08:40

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 30 '16 at 08:27

2

Try this

$x = '<p>aaaa</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>asd</p>';
$spaces = array('&nbsp;',' ');
echo str_replace($spaces,'',strip_tags($x));

answered Nov 30 '16 at 08:27

Rejoanul Alam

this was supposed to worked perfectly, but it returns multiple spaces. even though the second parameter is an empty string. why is that? – dapidmini Nov 30 '16 at 08:50

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

1

Can find the answer here. Or try:$line_out = preg_replace('/[\n\r]+/', '', $line_in);

edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

Community

answered Nov 30 '16 at 08:27

LenglBoy

1

this one works. thanks! I've searched google for almost an hour but I don't remember seeing that answer.. weird... – dapidmini Nov 30 '16 at 08:54

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 30 '16 at 08:30

1

The line breaks are caused by the <p> tags because they are block-level elements:

Browsers typically display the block-level element with a newline both before and after the element.

If you don't want HTML tags in your string you can remove them with strip_tags():

$string = strip_tags($string);

If you want to keep the <p> tags, you need to display them as inline elements using CSS:

p {
    display: inline; /* or display: inline-block; */
}

answered Nov 30 '16 at 08:30

simon

does that mean I don't need to use htmlspecialchars_decode or something to display the data from database? I thought strip_tags() is not secure enough? – dapidmini Nov 30 '16 at 08:53
@dapidmini depends on where the data is coming from. If this data is user input you need to use `htmlspecialchars()` on it – simon Nov 30 '16 at 09:19

3 Answers3