Question

Quick question:

What’s the best way to go about removing <br> and <br /> tags from the start and end of a $string?

I’m currently using this code, but it doesn’t appear to remove just <br> tags.

$str = preg_replace('{^(<br(\s*/)?>|ANDnbsp;)+}i', '', $str);
$str = preg_replace('{(<br(\s*/)?>|ANDnbsp;)+$}i', '', $str);

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EDIT: Additional Information

This code is dealing with information that has been imported from an old CMS.

As such, I know that the only two tags I need to replace are <br> and <br />. Additionally, I am only looking to replace these tags at the very beginning and very end of a $string, not in between.

I don’t need to deal with any other tags; malformed HTML nor additional attributes.

Essentially I would simply like to expand the code I have suggested so that the <br> tags are replaced as well as <br />.

I apologise for not offering enough information to begin with.

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Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

One possibility of regex is this:

"/(^)?(<br\s*\/?>\s*)+$/"

So let’s make it clearer:

$str = preg_replace("/(^)?(<br\s*\/?>\s*)+$/", "", $str);

Explaining:

• * – Match 0 or more times;
• \s – Matches any whitespace character;
• ? – Match 0 or 1 times; or: shortest match;
• ^ – Matches only in the beginning of the string;
• $ – Matches only in the end of the string;

A good starting point: Regular expressions in Perl