Stripping line-end stuff from a html template

awingnut · Apr 21, 2005

I have an HTML template that I read as s single string using fread(). My problem is that when I output the template (in an email attachment) there are all kinds of spurious line breaks which apparently are teh result of line-end stuff in the string. I tried using implode/explode to get rid of '\r' and '\n' but there seems to be something else that causes these breaks. Can someone tell me what characters I need to be stripping out to get this string corrected. TIA.

DRJ478 · Apr 21, 2005

1. HTML does not interpret whitespace. \r or \n only will show in the HTML source code.
2. implode/explode doesn't seem to be the best mechanism to remove \r or \n

Use str_replace():

Code:

$string = str_replace(array("\r","\n"),'',$string);

This will remove all instances of the \r and \n characters. However, I don't understand how the breaks manifest themselves. Where do they show? What makes you say they are spurious?

awingnut · Apr 21, 2005

Good question. After more examination it appears to be more sinister then that. It seems splits are in random locations. For example:

Template:

Code:

<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body,p,div,span,td,input,textarea {
    font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 10pt;
}
h4 {
   page-break-before: always;
}
-->
</style>

Resulting Raw Source:

Code:

<html><head><styl
e type="text/css"><!--body,p,div,span,td,input,textarea {	font-family: "Time
s New Roman", Times, serif;	font-size: 10pt;}h4 {	page-break-before: always;
}--></style>

While this in and of itself does not really effect the display it is an easy example. There are other places where this occurs that does effect the display (although I too cannot see why it matters). However, this is designed to be an attachment to an email and is intended to be printer friendly. I don't know if the Transfer-Encoding (quoted-printable) causes it to behave differently but I am pretty sure if I can get a contigous single string after the read, it will work (I use split_chunk() to add the post-processed string to the email body).

DRJ478 · Apr 21, 2005

What mechanism of e-mail generation do you use?
PHPMailer class phpmailer.sourceforge.net handles attachments beautifully - just a recommendation. May save you a lot of headache.

awingnut · Apr 21, 2005

I'm just using PHP send(). It works fine for other stuff. I need to look closer at the code that processes that string but I think the issus is still how it looks after fread().

DRJ478 · Apr 21, 2005

How are you using fread()? Local file system? Any kind of wrappers enabled?
That might give a clue.

awingnut · Apr 21, 2005

Code:

$fid=fopen("<local file path>","r");
if ($fid) {
   $str=$fread($fid,filesize("<local file path>"));
   $str=str_replace(array("\n","\r"),'',$str);
   .
   .
   .

DRJ478 · Apr 21, 2005

Have you tried file_get_contents()?

So, what you are saying is that right when reading the file in it is already chunked? Compare the output of fread() with file_get_contents.

awingnut · Apr 21, 2005

Thanks for all the help but I found it. It turned out to be split_chunk() that was messing it up (don't know why). I also don't know why I thought I needed to use it but eliminating it cured the problem.

DRJ478 · Apr 21, 2005

I have never seen any function split_chunk() in the PHP manual. Generic? Self developed?

Vragabond · Apr 21, 2005

I gather he's talking about this:

chunk_split()

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Stripping line-end stuff from a html template

awingnut

Programmer

DRJ478

IS-IT--Management

awingnut

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DRJ478

IS-IT--Management

awingnut

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DRJ478

IS-IT--Management

awingnut

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DRJ478

IS-IT--Management

awingnut

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DRJ478

IS-IT--Management

Vragabond

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