Question

How to remove multiple <br> tags from a RSS feed? I tried those two but it doesn’t make any change.

str_replace("<br/><br/>","&",$entry->description); 
str_replace("<br><br>","&",$entry->description); 
str_replace("&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;","&",$entry->description); 
str_replace("&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;","&",$entry->description); (with space)
Here is a sample

This is copied from feedburn RSS<br /><br />with view page source.

Answer 1

Open it in a DOM Parser and look for br elements of whom their nextSibling (or previousSibling if iterating in reverse) is another br element (you could repeat this for multiple br elements that are direct siblings). Then remove them.

$dom = new DOMDocument;

$dom->loadHTML($html);

$elements = $dom->getElementsByTagName('br');
$length = $elements->length;

while ($length--) {
   $elem = $elements->item($length);                
   $prevSibling = $elem->previousSibling;

if ($prevSibling->nodeType == 1 AND $prevSibling->tagName == 'br') {
       $parent = $elem->parentNode;
       $parent->removeChild($elem);
       $parent->removeChild($prevSibling);
       $length--;
   }

}

CodePad.

I chose to iterate in reverse to save another variable used for the incremental number.

I had to use a while() { ... } with an index because a foreach() would hold a reference to nodes I would be removing, which would result in errors.