How to Regex-replace multiple tags with one tag?

Question

I want

to turn into


What\'s the pattern for this with regex?

Note: The


Answer 1

(<br />)+

Will match them so you could use preg_replace to replace them (remember to correctly escape characters).

Answer 2

The answer from @FtDRbwLXw6 is great although it does not account for   spaces. We can extend this regex to include that as well:

$html = preg_replace('#(<br *\/?>\s*(&nbsp;)*)+#', '<br>', $html);

Answer 3

This works fine. It works with all the combinations below.

$html = '<br><br>
Some text
<br>
<br>
Some another<br/><br>';

$html = preg_replace("/(<br.*?>\s*)+(\n)*+(<br.*?>)/","<br>",$html);

$html will be changed to

<br>
Some text
<br>
Some another<br>

Answer 4

$html = preg_replace('#(<br */?>\s*)+#i', '<br />', $html);

This will catch any combination of <br>, <br/>, or <br /> with any amount or type of whitespace between them and replace them with a single <br />.

Answer 5

You could use s/(<br \/>)+/<br \/>/, but if you are trying to use regex on HTML you are likely doing something wrong.

Edit: A slightly more robust pattern you could use if you have mixed breaks:

/(<br\ ?\/?>)+/

This will catch <br/> and <br> as well, which might be useful in certain cases.