How do I remove extra <br/"> tags from HTML using PHP?

Question

I am parsing some dirty HTML with PHP that has some redundant tags in it
and I would like to clean them a bit. For instance:

<br> <br /><br /> <br> 

How would I replace something like this with preg_replace () ?:

 <br /><br /> 

New lines, spaces and differences between <br> , <br/> and <br /> must be considered.

Edit: Basically, I would like to replace each instance of three or more consecutive breaks with only two.

Answer 1

Here is what you can use. The first line is found when there are two or more <br> tags (with spaces between them and different types) and replace them with well-formed ones <br /><br /> .

I also included the second line to clear the remaining <br> tags if you want to do this too.

 function clean($txt) { $txt=preg_replace("{(<br[\\s]*(>|\/>)\s*){2,}}i", "<br /><br />", $txt); $txt=preg_replace("{(<br[\\s]*(>|\/>)\s*)}i", "<br />", $txt); return $txt; } 

Answer 2

This should work using a minimal qualifier:

 preg_replace('/(<br[\s]?[\/]?>[\s]*){3,}/', '<br /><br />', $multibreaks); 

Must match horrific designs <br><br /><br/><br> .

Answer 3

this will replace all gaps ... even if they are in uppercase:

 preg_replace('/<br[^>]*>/i', '', $string); 

Answer 4

Try:

 preg_replace('/<br\s*\/?>/', '', $inputString); 

Answer 5

Use str_replace, this is much better for a simple replacement, and you can also pass an array instead of a single search value.

 $newcode = str_replace("<br>", "", $messycode);