Opposite of nl2br? Is it str_replace?

Question

So the function nl2br is handy. Except in my web app, I want to do the opposite, interpret line breaks as new lines, since they will be echoed into a pre-filled form.

<

Answer 1

If whitespaces are stripped out before outputting the html (for minification), "\n", "\r", PHP_EOL, etc. will get stripped out. ASCII encoding will survive the stripping process.

function minify($buffer) {
    return preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', preg_replace('~>\s+<~', '><', $buffer));
}
ob_start('minify');

...

$nl = preg_replace('/\/i', "
", $br);
echo "{$nl}";

...

ob_get_flush();