How to remove <br> within a <textarea></textarea> only

Question

Hi, I have some articles stored in a text field in my database. There are times when the article includes <textarea>content.....</textarea> The problem is that when the content is displayed on a page using php, it includes the actual <br><br><br>. The <br> is placed there by the text editor (CKEditor) So it looks like the following

<textarea> <-- this actually becomes a textarea

This content is shown inside the text area<br> but the problem is that the <br> is also shown. </textarea>

How can I strip <br> from the <textarea> tags only. I imagine some preg replace would be useful.

Answer 1

Your best bet is to use an HTML parser to do it:

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($content);
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('textarea') as $textarea) {
  foreach ($textarea->childNodes as $child) {
    if ($child->nodeName == 'br') {
      $textarea->removeChild($child);
    }
  }
}
$content = $dom->saveHTML();

Basically regexes are a poor tool for processing HTML because HTML isn't "regular" in the sense of "regular expression". This means it doesn't handle things like nested elements without using an unreliable hack.

Answer 2

here's one way

$str= <<<A
    <textarea> <-- this actually becomes a textarea

    This content is shown inside the text area<br> but the problem is that the <br> is also shown. </textarea>
A;
$s = explode("</textarea>",$str);
for($i=0;$i<count($s)-1;$i++){
    if(strpos($s[$i],"<textarea>")!==FALSE){
        $s[$i] = preg_replace("/<br>/","",$s[$i]);
    }
}
print implode("</textarea>",$s);

Answer 3

Have you had a look at what the database is storing - maybe it's HTMLencoding it before writing to the database and so what you're seeing is actually :

<br />

This can happen when you use fields generated by CKEditor and TinyMCE as it escapes fields before $_POSTing

Answer 4

$x='<br><textarea>abcd<br>efgh</textarea><br><br>';

echo preg_replace('/<textarea>.*?<\/textarea>/e','str_replace("<br>","","\\0")',$x);

//<br><textarea>abcdefgh</textarea><br><br>

If you using <br />, please update it appropriately.

Answer 5

can you notice that if you write a comment here and you missed the name and email..

even if you write a new line

it returns without with new line and without
or /r/n

can anyone told me how to do that ... because i have a similar form, first of all i saved all fields in variables and if one field is empty i reprint the values in the fields from the variables.

but unfortunately in textarea the value returned with /r/n or if i use the function to replace /r/n to
it print and new new lines printed

i appreciate your help and i envy this text area below :)

Answer 6

finally i found the answer it is so strange.. but it fixed the problem.

as i notice.. if we write line 1 line2 line3

it actually write a the content with multi line and without
or or whatever

so i do the following function

---

function clear_string($string) { 
$string = str_replace(array('\r\n', '\r', '\n'), '
', $string); 
return $string; 
} 

---

and i use it whenever i want to save the content of textarea and save it on variable, also i can know easily echo the value of the variable for the textarea ... for example

<textarea><?php echo $notes;?> </textarea>

thank you so much for your help

and i hope it helps people who face same problem

Answer 7

Given the HTML...

<textarea id="text">Some text here.<br>Some other text.</textarea>

...perform this Javascript...

document.getElementById('text').value = document.getElementById('text').value.replace(/<br>/g,'\r');