Remove multiple
tag to single tag

Question

I need to replace all:

<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>

with

<p>&nbsp;</p>

using regex how would i go about doing this?

[Don't use regexes for parsing HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454) — John Conde, Mar 21 '13 at 13:15

CSᵠ · Answer 1 · 2013-03-26T13:48:47.150

1

If this is a well bounded case you can use preg_replace() to achieve that with:

RegEx: ( <\/p>\s*)+
Replacement: \1

Explained demo: http://regex101.com/r/vB5sZ0

edited Mar 26 '13 at 13:48

answered Mar 21 '13 at 13:19

CSᵠ

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Thanks for your comment Ka when i used
asdasdasd

this senerio nothing change .something wrong with this regex. – Zuhair Mirza Mar 26 '13 at 13:21

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 13:20

Despite some comment correctly pointing out that parsing HTML using regex's is dangerous, in controlled environments or when parsing isn't necessary (your case I believe, as you seem to only want to replace some stuff) I consider it to be the most optimal solution (despite not being perfect).

Either way, if I understood your question correctly you want to replace multiple duplicates with a single instance? In that case it can be simply achieved by a regex along the lines of:

 "<br><br>a<br><br><br>b".replace(/(<br>){2,}/g, '<br>');

That example is in javascript (as I could test it out from the browser console), but the regex and basic concept is the same in php: you match two or more instances of the string you're interested in and replace it with a single instance.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 13:21

0

You should use an html parser instead of regex.

But if the p tag is not nested you can use this regex

/<p>&nbsp;</p>/

answered Mar 21 '13 at 13:21

Anirudha

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 13:21

0

Here you go :

"<p>&nbsp;</p>\n<p>&nbsp;</p>\n<p>&nbsp;</p>"

    .replace(/(<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n?)+/, "<p>&nbsp;</p>");

answered Mar 21 '13 at 13:21

Romain

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oh sorry, i though this was tagged javascript ! – Romain Mar 21 '13 at 13:22
anyway, `(
<\/p>\n?)+` here is your regex ! ;)
– Romain Mar 21 '13 at 13:22

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 13:26

If you don't want to use regex, use str_replace.

Replace all    with one and do it until no change is made.

$input2 = $input_text;
$end = false;

while(!$end){
  $temp_text=str_replace("<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>","<p>&nbsp;</p>", $input2);
  if($temp_text == $input2){
    $end = true;
    }
  else{
    $input2 = $temp_text;
  }
}

In the line with str_replace() you might need to add a new line character (\n) and/or line feed (\r).

Remove multiple tag to single tag

5 Answers5

Remove multiple
tag to single tag