Question

Here is a code snippet from my page:

<input value="Search" type="submit" /><!-- whitespace
--><span class="vdivider"></span><!-- whitespace
--></form><!-- whitespace
--><form action="login_action.php" method="post"><!-- whitespace
--><?php

Those whitespace comments are to get rid of the whitespace on each side of the divider. Is this really the only way of doing this? There has to be a more elegant solution.

Answer 1

One option to consider – use a templating engine if you can. For example, in Smarty, there’s a {strip} function that does exactly this:

{* the following will be all run into one line upon output *}
{strip}
<table border='0'>
 <tr>
  <td>
   <a href="{$url}">
    <font color="red">This is a test</font>
   </a>
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>
{/strip}

Output:

<table border='0'><tr><td><a href="http://. snipped...</a></td></tr></table>