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.

str_replace can take <br /> and replace it with whatever I want, but if I put in \n, it echoes literally a backslash and an n. It only works if I put a literal line break in the middle of my script, and break the indentation (so there are no trailing space).

See:

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

Am I missing escape characters? I think I tried every combination...

Answer 1

There will probably be some situations where your code is not enough ; so, what about something like this, to do your replacement :

$html = 'this <br>is<br/>some<br />text <br    />!';
$nl = preg_replace('#<br\s*/?>#i', "\n", $html);
echo $nl;

i.e. a bit more complex than a simple str_replace ;-)

Note : I would generally say don't use regex to manipulate HTML -- but, in this case, considering the regex would be pretty simple, I suppose it would be OK.

Also, note that I used "\n"

• i.e. a newline : \n
• in a double-quoted string, so it's interpreted as a newline, and not a literal \n

Basically, a <br> tag generally looks like :

• <br>
• or <br/>, with any number of spaces before the /

And that second point is where str_replace is not enough.

Answer 2

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 3

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.