Limit the number of newlines in a string

A very short blog post this time. I often use the following short function to limit the number of breaks/newlines in comments that people can submit on a news article or other user input. You can easily limit the number of characters in a comment by using the PHP strlen function, but the comment can still use a lot of vertical space on your website if the user uses 5 breaks in his comment. See the function below to prevent this type of comments:

/**
 * limitBreaks, prevents texts with a lot of enters/breaks after each other
 *
 * @param string $sText
 * @param int $iAmount default 2, numbers of newlines that may occur after eachother
 * @return string, cleaned up string with limited number of newlines
 */
function limitBreaks($sText, $iAmount=2)
{
	return preg_replace("/[\r\n]{".($iAmount+1).",}\t*[\r\n]*/", str_repeat(PHP_EOL, $iAmount), $sText);
}

As you can see a simple but effective function.

Comments

20,501 responses to “Limit the number of newlines in a string”

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