How to replace all XHTML/HTML line breaks () with new lines?

Question

I am looking for the best br2nl function. I would like to replace all instances of
and


Answer 1

I would generally say "don't use regex to work with HTML", but, on this one, I would probably go with a regex, considering that
tags generally look like either :

• 

• or
, with any number of spaces before the /

I suppose something like this would do the trick :

$html = 'this 
is
some
text 
!';
$nl = preg_replace('##i', "\n", $html);
echo $nl;

Couple of notes :

• starts with
• followed by any number of white characters : \s*
• optionnaly, a / : /?
• and, finally, a >
• and this using a case-insensitive match (#i), as
would be valid in HTML