Question

I’m taking input from textarea form and put it in the long line.
Input is like this:

Country: France

City: Paris

Street: Champ

Then put it in the long line:

$line = $_POST['input'];

now, I need to replace spaces and new lines with <SP> and <BR>, so I do this:

$line = str_replace(" ","&ltSP&gt",$line);
$line = str_replace("\n","&ltBR&gt",$line);

but I get this:

Country:<SP>France <BR> <BR>City:<SP>Paris <BR> <BR>Street:<SP>Champ

Now, if insted of \n I tried this:

$line = str_replace("\r","&ltBR&gt",$line);

I get similar result. If I do them both i Get similar results which obviously has some spaces in it. So Then I do this:

$line = str_replace(" ","",$line);

but it stays the same.

My whole code is:

 $line = str_replace(" ","&ltSP&gt",$line);
 $line = str_replace("\n","&ltBR&gt",$line);
 $line = str_replace(" ","",$line);
 echo $line;

How to remove spaces in this case?

Edit:
I did bin2hex and found out that the space is actually carriage return \r.
So this is the solution:

$line = str_replace("\r","",$line);

Why did \r behave like space in this case?

Answer 1

the comments will probably suffice but I thought I’d share this snippet, which given your example I had a punt at what you are trying to achieve.

<?php

// example string data
$str = "key1 value1 key2 value2 key3 value3";

// clean string 
$str = str_replace("&nbsp", " ",$str);
$str = str_replace("\n", " ", $str);
$str = str_replace("\r", " ", $str);

$arr = explode(" ", $str);
$out = "<ul>";
$cnt = 1;

foreach($arr as &$val) {
    if ($cnt++ % 2 == 0) {
        continue;
    } else {
        $out = $out . "<li>" . $val . ": " . current($arr) . "</li>";
    }
}

$out = $out . "</ul>";

echo $out;

// output source
// <ul><li>key1: value1</li><li>key2: value2</li><li>key3: value3</li></ul>

?>