New line to paragraph function

Question

I have this interesting function that I\'m using to create new lines into paragraphs. I\'m using it instead of the nl2br() function, as it outputs better formatted

Answer 1

Here's an approach that comes with a reverse method to replace paragraphs back to regular line breaks and vice versa.

These are useful to use when building a form input. When saving a users input you may want to convert line breaks to paragraph tags, however when editing the text in a form, you may not want the user to see any html characters. Then we would replace the paragraphs back to line breaks.

// This function will convert newlines to HTML paragraphs
// without paying attention to HTML tags. Feed it a raw string and it will
// simply return that string sectioned into HTML paragraphs
function nl2p($str) {
    $arr=explode("\n",$str);
    $out='';

    for($i=0;$i0)
            $out.='
'.trim($arr[$i]).'
';
    }
    return $out;
}

// Return paragraph tags back to line breaks
function p2nl($str)
{
    $str = preg_replace("/]*?>/", "", $str);
    $str = str_replace("
", "\r\n", $str);
    return $str;
}