replace line break with 2 spans in php - 【StackMirror】|php|html|regex

Consider the following HTML string:

<p>This is line 1 <br /> and this is line 2</p>

How can i replace the above with the following string using PHP / Regex

<p><span class="single-line">This is line 1</span><span class="single-line">and this is line 2</span></p>

2012-04-04 08:21
by Yens

The CSS spec teaches you to not create meta-representation with class attributes and div/spans. So please don't do it. The answer is: DOMDocument + Xpath - hakre 2012-04-04 08:24

what about divs? why do you not use div instead of span? div is a block element which should work for you like a charm - Lukas Schulze 2012-04-04 08:30

div is not a valid element inside a - PatrikAkerstrand 2012-04-04 09:00

This works but I would advise you not to rely on regular expressions for HTML parsing / transformation:

$string = '<p>This is line 1 <br /> and this is line 2</p>';
$pattern = '~([^<>]+)<br[[:blank:]]*/?>([^<>]+)~i';
$replacement = '<span class="single-line">$1</span><span class="single-line">$2</span>';

echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);

2012-04-04 08:33
by Alix Axel

I do not really suggest that you actually do it (because IMHO you're misusing markup and classes), however it's actually pretty simple:

you replace

<p>

with

<p><span class="single-line">

and

<br />

with

</span><span class="single-line">

and finally

</p>

with

</span></p>

A PHP function that can replace strings is strtr^Docs.

Note that this works only for exactly the HTML fragment you've given in your question. If you need this more precise, you should consider using DOMDocument and DOMXPath as I already commented above.

2012-04-04 08:29
by hakre

I'll try this changing the spans into div's considering semantics. I'm not sure about the formatting because our client uses tinymce to insert the text into the database - Yens 2012-04-04 08:34