br2nl - Converts HTML line breaks to new lines in PHP

br2nl is a simple PHP function that converts HTML line breaks (<br>, <br/>, and <br />) to new lines (\n) in a string.

This function can be useful when dealing with text entered through an HTML form that includes line breaks. Using br2nl ensures that the line breaks are properly formatted in the output.

Usage

The br2nl function takes a single parameter, the string to be converted. Here's an example usage:

$text = "Hello<br>world!";
$converted_text = br2nl($text);
echo $converted_text;

The output of this code would be:

Hello
world!

Code

/**
 * Converts HTML line breaks to new lines in a string.
 *
 * @param string $string The string to convert.
 * @return string The converted string.
 */
function br2nl($string)
{
    return preg_replace('/\<br(\s*)?\/?\>/i', "\n", $string);
}

br2nl uses a regular expression to find and replace all occurrences of <br> tags (with or without attributes) with newline characters.

Notes

• This function does not remove any other HTML tags.
• The converted string may still contain HTML entities (e.g.   for non-breaking spaces), which may need to be further processed depending on your use case.