Why is that trim() returns i>abc</i instead of <i>abc</i> when using trim($string, "<br />") on the string below?
$string = " <br /> <br /> <i>abc</i> <br /> <br /> </br>";
I wanted to remove all <br /> tags from the beginning and end of the string considering that there might be some whitespaces in between <br> tags.
Any suggestions or workarounds?
The second parameter to trim isn't a string as such, more a list of chars you want to strip from the start and end of the string. So, you're telling to strip all leading and trailing <, >, \, b and r characters.
Could try something like this regex to strip what you want from the front and end of a string...
//trim from start
$str=preg_replace('{^(?:<br />|</br>|\s+)+}', '', $str);
//trim from end
$str=preg_replace('{(?:<br />|</br>|\s+)+$}', '', $str);
Just to break down that first one...
{} to delimit my regex, just so I don't need to escape the matches on backslashes which I'd have to if I used the 'normal' // delimiter^ anchors the match to the start of the string(?: ) is just a group of things we want to look for<br />, </br> or any whitespace sequence \s+ - you can see each of these patterns is separated by | to indicate each is a possible alternative match+ to indicate we want to find one or more matches of that groupThe second one is similar, but anchored to the end of the string with $
| operator., and also your regex won't match </br> .
(:? instead of (?: . @op note that this regex or mine would match also the spaces which are at the beginning of <space>foo string. If you don't care about that. Then no prob..: char at the start! fixed!The second parameter of trim() is a string containing all characters that will be trimmed. Not words or substrings, but characters. It means that < and > will be trimmed too, and this is what happens.
What you need to do is either str_replace the <br /> out before the trim, like str_replace('<br />', '', $string), or do a strip_tags($string, '<i>') that will delete all tags except <i>
I wanted to remove all
<br>tags from the beginning and end of the string.
preg_replace('~^(?:\s|<br\h*\/>|<\/br>)+|(?:\s|<br\h*\/>|<\/br>)+$~m', '', $string);
\h* matches zero or more horizontal spaces.
<br />. It trims<'s thenb's, thenr's, then spaces, then/'s and finally>'s.trimmanual page.I wanted to remove all <br /> tags from the beginning and end of the string, so you don't want to remove thebrtags which was present at the middle?