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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T12:33:59+00:00

I have a CMS system that allows people to also use HTML code, but

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I have a CMS system that allows people to also use HTML code, but a nl2br is provided at the end of the function, which makes this:

<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>

into this:

<ul><br/>
<li></li><br/>
</ul>

Now I want to remove these <br/>‘s that exist between <ul> tags.

I already found another question which asks almost the same, but for newlines. I’ve integrated this inside my CMS but for one client all the content is already filled in so I have to fix this after the \n‘s are replaced with <br/>‘s.

The other question provides this as a regex to match \n within <ul></ul>:

/(?<=<ul>|<\/li>)\s*?(?=<\/ul>|<li>)/is

I’d think something like this:

/(?<=<ul>|<\/li>)(<br>|<br\/>|<br \/>)(?=<\/ul>|<li>)/is

Would do the trick, but it doesn’t. What am I missing?

EDIT

I am very open for DOMDocument solutions, if there’s a way to query linebreaks with xpath this would probably fix my problem.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In the example you provided, <br> tags are surrounded by some white-space (at least by new line characters), so this needs to be reflected in the corresponding regular expression.

    /(?<=<ul>|<\/li>)(\s*<br>\s*|\s*<br\/>\s*|\s*<br \/>\s*)(?=<\/ul>|<li>)/is

    In many cases regular expressions are NOT the best way for parsing HTML (I definitely agree with the comments above/below), but they are always good enough for some particular purposes.

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