3 Ways To Remove Line Breaks In PHP (Simple Examples)

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?

That should cover the basics, but read on for more examples!

 

 

TLDR – QUICK SLIDES

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

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”.

 

 

 

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EXAMPLE CODE DOWNLOAD

Click here for the source code on GitHub gist, just click on “download zip” or do a git clone. I have released it under the MIT license, so feel free to build on top of it or use it in your own project.

 

 

LINKS & REFERENCES

• String Replace – PHP
• Preg Replace – PHP
• Trim – PHP

 

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