Question

Anyone know of a good reg exp that can do this, optimally in one go? It needs to remove whitespace at begin/end of each line, remove LFs and CRs and replace with a single space but if there’s a <br> (or <br/>) at the end of the line it should not add a space. I’d need this in a JavaScript conform regexp.

Answer 1

I would use something along these lines:

var str = '  foo<br>\nbar\nbaz \n quox\nquox';
// split into lines
var lines = str.split('\n');
// iterate over each line
for (var i = lines.length; i--; ) {
  // trim whitespace
  lines[i] = lines[i].replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '');
  // add whitespace at the end if string doesn't end with "<br>"
  if (!/<br>$/.test(lines[i])) lines[i] += ' ';
}
// concatenate into a string again
lines.join('');