Parsing Data Removing Line Breaks

[Vitaminwater]

Hello All,

Currently, I'm trying to parse some information from another website using file_get_contents. After I have the source code I go through and parse out some information that I need. This information is then going to be put into a database. However, i'm having some trouble manipulating the last bit on information. Here is an example of how the information I need is being displayed:

http://conntext.us/testing.php


I would like to have the line breaks removed from this string of test. I have tried to use various methods of str_replace, preg_replace etc, but none have seemed to do what I want.

When completed I would also like to add <br /> to the end of each line, (which i should be able to do) so that the plaintext output to be like this:

Deli<br />
Lemon Tarragon Tuna Salad on Bagel<br />
Made to Order Deli Core<br />
Dessert<br />
Apple Crisp<br />

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

 

[angelwatt]

Can you show what you've tried? I've done this with preg_replace a number of times so I know it's possible. Just need to see where you may be messing up. A function that may help in the later part of this process is the nl2br function.

 

[Vitaminwater]

Well, Currently I'm using

$dinnerMenu = ereg_replace("[\n\r]", "\t", $dinnerMenu);
$dinnerMenu = ereg_replace("\t\t+", "\n", $dinnerMenu);

to make it look close enough to what i'm trying to do, (http://conntext.us/testing.php) but when i try to add the <br /><br /> to the end of the line it messes up (http://conntext.us/testing.php?addchars) I'm adding the br's with this line of code:

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

 

[Darth.Titan]

Well using your example page, repeated newlines aren't the only problem. There's a whole bunch of excess tabs and spaces in there as well. I chose to get rid of any newlines that were at the beginning of a line, then I filtered out the excess tabs and spaces and ran the result through nl2br.

This seems to get the result you said you wanted in the OP.

$content = file_get_contents('http://conntext.us/testing.php');

$cleaned = preg_replace("`^[\n\r]|\t|[ ]{2,}`","",$content);
$final = nl2br($cleaned);

echo $final;

 

[Vitaminwater]

Ah yes, that did it, thank you very much for your help Darth and angelwatt.

Have a good day.