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

    <?php echo strip_tags('Dear<br/>Bidibidi'); ?>
    Dear
    Bidibidi

    <?php echo nl2br('Dear
                Bidibidi'); ?>
    Dear<br/>Bidibidi

http://php.net/manual/tr/function.strip-tags.php

Answer 2

I just skipped nl2br() and used this in another way like this:

$post_content  = str_replace('\n',"<br />",$post_content );

and all works fine.

For complete description, please visit to my blog, here:

How to use nl2br and reverse br2nl

Answer 3

An alternative to @PascalMARTIN 's answer:

$string = str_replace(array(
    '<br>',
    '<br/>',
    '<br />',
), "\n", $string);

It does not work with multiple white-spaces like <br /> but this should be a really rare case.

Answer 4

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('/\<br(\s*)?\/?\>/i', "&#10;", $br);
echo "<textarea>{$nl}</textarea>";

...

ob_get_flush();

Answer 5

You'd want this:

<?=str_replace('<br />',"\n",$foo)?>

You probably forgot to use double quotes. Strings are only parsed for special characters if you use double quotes.

Answer 6

Are you writing '\n'? Because \n will only be interpreted correctly if you surround it with double quotes: "\n".

Off topic: the <?= syntax is evil. Please don't use it for the sake of the other developers on your team.