I have a website where users are required to write a simple, short profile description. Some users are writing ugly profiles with a bunch of empty spaces, and excess new lines. It's a lot of work to edit these manually afterwards. Here is an example of this:
$string = "
first sentence has w aaa yy too many excess spaces
and too many lines
between
paragraphs.
";
This is what I want: (maximum of one blank line between paragraphs, only one space between words)
$string = "first sentence has w aaa yy too many excess spaces
and too many lines
between
paragraphs";
I need a combination of functions in PHP that would correct this. I searched for these and found one that replaces more than 1 new line with just 1, but I wish to have a maximum of one blank line between paragraphs - but no more that. I also found one that removes excess white spaces, but it is removing the new lines, it won't work:
$string = preg_replace('/(\r\n|\r|\n)+/', "\n", trim($string));
$string = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $string);
I know there are different types of new lines /\r\n|\r|\n/ depending on device. I wouldn't have a clue how to handle all of it at once. I need help setting up a combination of functions that would work for my case.
You could try:
$string = preg_replace('/[^\S\n\r]{2,}/', ' ', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/(\r?\n)(?:\r?\n)+/', '$1$1', $string);
The first regex replacement replaces all occurrences of 2 or more whitespace (but not CRLF) characters with just a single space. The second replacement removes extra continuous CRLF.