Question

How would I use str_replace to find every ending square bracket ‘]’ and remove 2 or less linebreaks from the end. So, if there were 1 or 2 line breaks after ] it’d remove all. If there were 3 you’d end up with 1 after the ]. 4 you’d end up with 2 after etc.

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

Since you mentioned str_replace, I assume that you are using PHP (you should add a tag for that if this is the case!). And since you tagged regular expressions you might want to use preg_replace instead. This should work rather platform-independently then:

$newstr = preg_replace('/\](?:\r\n|\n|\r){1,2}/', ']', $str);

where $str is obviously your original string.

Note that the ] gets escaped, because it’s a special regex character (used for character classes). The round brackets just contain a list of all possible linebreaks. The ?: is optional and more relevant for complex regular expressions where you need to access captured subpatterns (in fact the ?: says, don’t match this subpattern, because I don’t need it). And the {1,2} simply says, match one or two of those. And since regular expressions are greedy by default, it will take two if it can.

EDIT: One more thought. You could solve this with str_replace, but not so well in one go for all possible linebreaks (because str_replace doesn’t support alternatives). This example might give you an idea.