Welcome to a quick tutorial on how to remove line breaks in PHP. Need to get rid of all line breaks from a string? Remove some extra ones?
The common ways to remove line breaks in PHP are:
$nobreak = str_replace(["\r", "\n"], "", $STRING);
$nobreak = preg_replace("/\r|\n/", "", $STRING);
$nobreak = trim($STRING);
That should cover the basics, but read on for more examples!
ⓘ I have included a zip file with all the source code at the start of this tutorial, so you don’t have to copy-paste everything… Or if you just want to dive straight in.
TLDR – QUICK SLIDES
Fullscreen Mode – Click Here
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DOWNLOAD & NOTES
Firstly, here is the download link to the example code as promised.
QUICK NOTES
If you spot a bug, feel free to comment below. I try to answer short questions too, but it is one person versus the entire world… If you need answers urgently, please check out my list of websites to get help with programming.
EXAMPLE CODE DOWNLOAD
Click here to download all the example source code, I have released it under the MIT license, so feel free to build on top of it or use it in your own project.
REMOVE LINE BREAKS
All right, let us now get into the ways to remove line breaks in PHP.
METHOD 1) STRING REPLACE
<?php
// (A) STRING WITH LINE BREAKS
$str = "Hello
World
Foo Bar!
";
echo $str;
// (B) REPLACE LINEBREAKS WITH EMPTY STRING (REMOVE)
$nobreak = str_replace(["\r", "\n"], "", $str);
echo $nobreak;
This is probably one of the easiest and fastest methods. Just replace all line breaks (\r
and \n
) with an empty string, effectively removing all of them.
METHOD 2) REGULAR EXPRESSION
<?php
// (A) STRING WITH LINE BREAKS
$str = "Hello
World
Foo Bar!
";
echo $str;
// (B) REPLACE LINEBREAKS WITH EMPTY STRING (REMOVE)
$nobreak = preg_replace("/\r|\n/", "", $str);
echo $nobreak;
Next, we have something called the “regular expression”. In simple terms, regular expressions allow us to input our own custom match-and-replace terms, and it can get extremely complicated. So I will just leave this here – /\r|\n/
is the regular expression to match all line breaks.
METHOD 3) TRIM
<?php
// (A) STRING WITH LINE BREAKS
$str = "
Hello World
";
echo $str;
// (B) TRIM - REMOVE LEADING & TRAILING LINE BREAKS
$nobreak = trim($str);
echo $nobreak;
To only remove the leading and trailing line breaks, use the trim()
function instead. Yes, take note, trim()
leaves all line breaks in-between as-it-is.
METHOD 4) REMOVE HTML LINE BREAKS
<?php
// (A) HTML LINE BREAKS
$str = "Hello<br>World<br/>Foo";
echo $str;
// (B) REMOVE HTML LINE BREAKS
$nobreak = str_replace(["<br>", "<br/>"], "", $str);
echo $nobreak;
Lastly, this should be pretty self-explanatory. To remove HTML line breaks (<br>
or <br/>
), we do the same old “replace all <br><br/>
with an empty string”.
EXTRA BITS & LINKS
That’s all for the tutorial, and here is a small section on some extras and links that may be useful to you.
LINKS & REFERENCES
- String Replace – PHP
- Preg Replace – PHP
- Trim – PHP
INFOGRAPHIC CHEAT SHEET

THE END
Thank you for reading, and we have come to the end. I hope that it has helped you to better understand, and if you want to share anything with this guide, please feel free to comment below. Good luck and happy coding!