使用正则表达式删除空的段落标记<p> </ p>（“空间”上的标准str_replace不起作用）

Question

TinyMCE creates empty paragraph tags when you hit enter twice. like:

<p> </p>

Which is <p>SPACE</p>

In FireBug it calls this space a " " but the html code/DB backend just shows a space. When I do "str_replace('<p> </p>'....." it doesnt find the block... basically I think the "space" is somehow not a standard space and some sort of borked encoded space. Is there a regex I can run that will remove this tag? I've been stuck on this for hours... or even something like

regex('<p>LESS THAN THREE CHARS</p>'...)

would probably work

Thank you

Answer 1

I would use:

$str = preg_replace('~<p>\s*<\/p>~i','',$str);

where \s signifies a white space of any kind (tab, space, etc.) and * indicates 0 or more occurence of this (space). So <p></p>, <p> </p>, <p>{multiple spaces here}</p> will all be replaced by an empty string. The additional i flag is for case-insensitivity, just in case <p>'s might instead be <P>'s.