Can cascading text be converted to single line form?

morpheuz · 06-08-2005, 02:36 AM

Manual editing of html source to remove breaks (Enter) is annoying as hell. Is there a way to force text to single line in php?

redhead · 06-08-2005, 03:46 AM

ereg_replace() and preg_replace()

morpheuz · 06-08-2005, 06:47 AM

Documentation on the two is a little confusing to me and I can't even get php_strip_whitespace to work >_<. The word wrap function has given me the most success out of everything I tried so far. Those goddamn enter pushed line breaks seem to be above the law.

Can you give me a example from the functions you provided? I have html in a text file I'd like to do this to.

redhead · 06-08-2005, 08:09 AM

Just from teh top of my head

PHP Code:


			
$file = "my_file.html";

$file_contents = file_get_contents ($file);

$string_without_newline = ereg_replace('\n', '', $file_contents);

echo $string_without_newline;

morpheuz · 06-08-2005, 10:21 AM

Very interesting, that code only seems to work within the browser. The source is still cascading when opened/remade, but the browser output is changed (though it still doesn't look like what I'm after). I can't see a use for this currently, but thanks anyways. I combined your code with fopen/fwrite/fclose. Here's what it looks like.

PHP Code:


			
<?

$file = "tman.html"; 

$file_contents = file_get_contents ($file); 

$string_without_newline = ereg_replace('\n', '', $file_contents); 

$np = "tman.txt";

$o = fopen($np,'w');

fwrite($o, $string_without_newline);

fclose($o);

?>

DJMaze · 06-08-2005, 11:17 AM

Code:

ereg_replace('\n', '', $file_contents);

This should be double quoted

Code:

ereg_replace("\n", '', $file_contents);

Huge difference here

morpheuz · 06-08-2005, 11:58 AM

Definitely made the difference DJ, thanks.

I still find it very interesting that this change doesn't translate when saving to text, it only effects html.

So, double quoting stuff makes sure you get the value of what's inside quotes? What is the purpose of using single quotes if this is the case?

DJMaze · 06-08-2005, 01:31 PM

'\n' = \n
"\n" = new-line

there's also \t, \r, \0, etc.
The difference between single and double is static vs dynamic strings

For example try:

Code:

$bob = 'hi it\'s me';
echo "$bob";

$bob = "hi it's me";
echo "\$bob";

$bob = "hi it's me";
echo '$bob';

That will hopefully explain it a bit.