br2nl() - PHP custom function to convert BR tags in a string to Newline Character

Line Break to new Line character conversion in PHP

When we fetch string data which contains BR tags from database to display in a textarea, the BR tags may display as such with out adding a new line. To handle this we have to convert the BR tags in the string to Newline character. Here is a custom php function to do this function. This function works just opposite to nl2br() builtin function in PHP which converts all New line character to BR tag.

We shall name the function as br2nl().

The below given version of function uses regular expression preg_replace for replacement of BR tag (<br/>) to Newline character (\n).

function br2nl( $inputStr ) {
return( preg_replace('/<br\s?\/?>/i', "\r\n", $testString ) );
}

//input string
$testString = "A test string<br/><br />It works<BR><br>";
$transformedString = br2nl( $testString );

Here is another version which uses php builtin function str_ireplace for the replacement.

function br2nl($str) {
return( str_ireplace(['<br />','<br>','<br/>'], "\r\n", $str) );
}

//input string
$testString = "A test string<br/><br />It works<BR><br>";
//calling br2nl function
$transformedString = br2nl( $testString );

Hope this helps :)