Undoing nl2br

[kjc]

Does anyone know if it is possible to undone nl2br. I am writing a forum and want to be able to allw users to edit their posts in a text area box. As the message has been 'nl2br' before inserted into the database, all the </br> show up.

[bcarl314]

Just a guess, but did you try something like this:


$myString = strtr($myString, "<br />", "\n");

[jeske]

Hi,
Another option is to submit to the database without using nl2br, leaving the newlines intact. Then use nl2br when retrieving and formatting the data for display. That way, the newlines stay intact when the data is pulled back in a text box for editing.

Jeff

[beetle]

jeske's suggestion (as is my own) should be the way it's done. If you read the page on nl2br() in the PHP manual (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php), they talk about this very concept, and why there isn't a br2nl() function.

[beetle]

Oh, and if you do want a function to do this, better use preg_replace instead of strtr as bcarl314 suggested. strtr translates characters and treats the string arguments as arrays...so $myString = strtr($myString, "<br />", "\n");
will populate $mystring with "\nr />". Not exactly what we want.

Example of preg_replace()$myString = preg_replace("/<br( \\/)?>/", "\n", $myString);

[firepages]

I would suggest a simple

$str=str_replace('<br />','',$str);

is plenty , would not suggest regex unless you really need it (though how str_replace is handled internally I dont know)

[Ökii]

To add yet another note - if you use single quotes around function parameters you can use a hard typed newline.

$data = str_replace('<br />','
',$data);

would be perfectly valid.

[kjc]

Originally posted by Ökii
To add yet another note - if you use single quotes around function parameters you can use a hard typed newline.

$data = str_replace('<br />','
',$data);

would be perfectly valid.

Thanks to you all! I have gone with Okii suggestion and it works fine, but thanks to everyone else for their suggestions. :thumbsup:

[russia5]

Take a look at PHP Freaks code snippets.

[Fumigator]

You're... digging up a four year old post that was resolved? heh. I only do that when I'm drunk.

[lavinpj1]

Haha. Gotta be mighty drunk to dig THAT deep.

~Phil~

[Mwnciau]

function br2nl($text)
{
return preg_replace('/<br\\\\s*?\\/??>/i', "\\n", $text);
}

That was in the manual.

[marek_mar]

Odd. That won't work.