How to remove all break tags from a string in PHP?

Question

Seems simple enough but I'm having some issues, I tried using preg_replace:

preg_replace("<br />", "", $string);

But what I get is this <> in place of the <br /> in the string when outputted. The break tags in the string will always be in this format not in any of these:

<br/>
<br>
<BR />
etc.

so what's the error I'm making?

Answer 1

preg_replace("#<br />#", "", $string);

You needed a delimiter character. # works fine here, since it's not used in the regex.

Answer 2

In addition to what Matthew Flaschen said, you could probably get away with simply str_replace() as you are not using any of a regex's power there.

Alternatively you could match different types of <br /> like so (using a regex this time)...

#<br\s?/?>#

This will match <br/>, <br>, <br />. Add the i flag to make it match in a case insensitive manner (or use str_ireplace() if not using the regex).

Also, if you are doing any more HTML manipulation than this, consider a parser.