How to remove line breaks no characters from the string

Question

This might appear to be a dupe  but rest assured it isn t - I have searched both SO as well as the rest of the web for an answer to my problem and ended up finding the same insufficient  solutions  over and over  Anyhow  here it goes   I m saving user input from a textarea to a MySQL database  within a WordPress environment  but that ought not to matter to this problem  I believe   It is later retrieved from the DB to be shown to Admins in the backend of the site  The problem occurs when users submit text with line breaks  i e  hit the Enter key    A sample string might look like this   Dear friends  I just wanted so Hello  How are you guys  I m fine  thanks   Greetings  Bill   There are no end of line characters    n     r   or the like  in the string   I am using nl2br   on it to generate HTML output  but that s not enough  The result then is   Dear friends  I just wanted so Hello  How are you guys  I m fine  thanks  lt br   gt   lt br   gt  Greetings  lt br   gt  Bill   Which  as far as I understand it  is the expected nl2br   result  as that inserts the tags and isn t supposed to replace the line-breaks in the first place   However the format I need would be this   Dear friends  I just wanted so Hello  How are you guys  I m fine  thanks  lt br   gt  lt br   gt Greetings  lt br   gt Bill   If the string had EOL characters such as   n  in it  I d hit it with either str replace   or preg replace   and be done with it  but I have no clue what needle to feed either of those functions if there ain t no characters there in the first place   I can manually access the relevant field in the DB  hit Backspace for every linebreak and what I later on want to do with the string works  So I know I need the above format

User · Answer

You can also use PHP trim

This function returns a string with whitespace stripped from the beginning and end of str. Without the second parameter, trim() will strip these characters:

" " (ASCII 32 (0x20)), an ordinary space.

"\t" (ASCII 9 (0x09)), a tab.

"\n" (ASCII 10 (0x0A)), a new line (line feed).

"\r" (ASCII 13 (0x0D)), a carriage return.

"\0" (ASCII 0 (0x00)), the NUL-byte.

"\x0B" (ASCII 11 (0x0B)), a vertical tab.

User · Answer

You should be able to replace it with a preg that removes all newlines and carriage returns  The code is   preg replace     r  n         yourString      Even though the  n characters are not appearing  if you are getting carriage returns there is an invisible character there  The preg replace should grab and fix those

User · Answer

It s because nl2br   doesn t remove new lines at all      Returns string with  lt br   gt  or  lt br gt  inserted before all newlines   r n   n r   n and  r     Use str replace instead    string   str replace array   r n     r     n      lt br   gt     string

User · Answer

To work properly also on Windows I d suggest to use   buffer   str replace array   r n     r     n         buffer       r n  - for Windows    r  - for Mac and   n  - for Linux

User · Answer

str     Dear friends  I just wanted so Hello  How are you guys  I m fine  thanks  lt br   gt   lt br   gt  Greetings  lt br   gt  Bill    echo str replace array   n     r         str       echo  str in a single line

User · Answer

str replace PHP EOL  null   str

User · Answer

I use 3 lines to do this job  so consider  s as your  stuff       s str replace chr 10      s    s str replace chr 13      s    s str replace   r n       s

User · Answer

Alternative built-in  trim    trim     Strip whitespace  or other characters  from the beginning and end of a string Description    trim   string  str    string  character mask      t n r 0 x0B        string  This function returns a string with whitespace stripped from the beginning and end of str  Without the second parameter  trim   will strip these characters            ASCII 32  0x20    an ordinary space        t   ASCII 9  0x09    a tab        n   ASCII 10  0x0A    a new line  line feed         r   ASCII 13  0x0D    a carriage return        0   ASCII 0  0x00    the NUL-byte        x0B   ASCII 11  0x0B    a vertical tab    It s there to remove line breaks from different kinds of text files  but does not handle html

User · Answer

Ben s solution is acceptable  but str replace   is by far faster than preg replace     buffer   str replace array   r     n         buffer     Using less CPU power  reduces the world carbon dioxide emissions

User · Answer

Something a bit more functional  easy to use anywhere    function strip carriage returns  string        return str replace array   n r     n     r         string       Using PHP EOL as the search replacement parameter is also a good idea  Kudos

[php] How to remove line breaks (no characters!) from the string?

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