phpregexpreg-replacewhitespacebbcode

Remove whitespace between bbcode tags in a string

I need to remove all whitespace between adjacent BBCode tags in a string without affecting whitespaces in a BBCode's text. The input is something like:

*[ul]
    [li]List Item 1[/li]
    [li]List Item 2[/li]
[/ul]*

After removing the new lines and tabs, it looks like this:

[ul] [li]List Item 1[/li] [li]List Item 2[/li] [/ul]

To ensure that the whitespace doesn't interfere with the code, I need to remove all whitespace between the commands ([ul], [li], [/ul], [/li]). How can I achieve this?

Solution

  • You could do something like this, using a regex and preg_replace():

    $text = preg_replace('/\[(.*?)\]\s*\[/', '[\1][', $text);

    You can visualize how this regex works here.