How to remove more than one whitespace character from HTML?

Question

I want to remove extra whitespace which is coming from the user end, but I can't predict the format of the HTML.

For example:

<p> It's interesting that you would try cfsetting, since nothing in it's
documentation would indicate that it would do what you are asking.
Unless of course you were mis-reading what "enableCFoutputOnly" is
supposed to do.


</p>



<p>



It's interesting that you would try cfsetting, since nothing in it's
documentation would indicate that it would do what you are asking.
Unless of course you were mis-reading what "enableCFoutputOnly" is
supposed to do.</p>

Please guide me on how to remove more than one whitespace character from HTML.

Answer 1

You could use regex to replace any cases of multiple whitespace characters with a single space by looping over the result until no more multiple whitespace occurances exist:

lastTry = "<p>   lots of space    </p>";
nextTry = rereplace(lastTry,"\s\s", " ", "all");
while(nextTry != lastTry) {
  lastTry = nextTry;
  nextTry = REReplace(lastTry,"\s\s", " ", "all");
}

Tested working in CF10.

Answer 2

if you don't want to do it thru code out of total lazyness

=> http://jsbeautifier.org/

if you want to do it by code then a regex would be another option

Answer 3

This should do it:

<cfscript>
  string function stripCRLFAndMultipleSpaces(required string theString) {
    local.result = trim(rereplace(trim(arguments.theString), "([#Chr(09)#-#Chr(30)#])", " ", "all"));
    local.result = trim(rereplace(local.result, "\s{2,}", " ", "all"));
    return local.result;
  }
</cfscript>