Remove Line Breaks in WordPress

In the WordPress editor, lines that have a line break at the end of them will be turned into an HTML line break tag <br> then they are output on the site. This is often desirable, but not always. The functions below show how to remove line breaks in WordPress.

      
        <?php
      
        /**
      
         * Apply new wpautop filter to Press Release content
      
         */
      
        function km_filter_press_release_content() {
      
        	if ( ! is_singular( 'press-releases' ) ) {
      
        		return;
      
        	}
      
        	remove_filter( 'the_content', 'wpautop' );
      
        	add_filter( 'the_content', 'km_remove_wpautop_line_breaks' );
      
        }
      
        add_action( 'wp', 'km_filter_press_release_content' );
      
        /**
      
         * Apply wpautop() to content and remove line breaks
      
         *
      
         * @param  string $content the_content().
      
         * @return string          the_content() with line breaks removed.
      
         */
      
        function km_remove_wpautop_line_breaks( $content ) {
      
        	return wpautop( $content, false );
      
        }

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You can see that in the first function, I’m limiting this to only run on single posts of the press-releases post type. Just change that conditional to apply to your use case and change all instances of km_ to whatever function prefix you’d like to use.

Regex

As an alternative, you could try applying a regular expression to the content like in the code below. This could be helpful for removing line breaks before importing a post into the database.

      
        <?php
      
        $string = 'This is a new paragraph with
      
        arbitrarily inserted newlines
      
        at a certain width. To keep
      
        these from turning into <br>s,
      
        we want to replace them the right
      
        way.
      
        When there is a double new-line,
      
        then we know that it really is a
      
        new paragraph, and it is OK to keep
      
        both newlines together.';
      
        $content_without_line_breaks = preg_replace( '/(^|[^\n\r])[\r\n](?![\n\r])/', '$1 ', $string );

view raw remove-line-breaks-with-regex.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Output from the preg_replace() above:

This is a new paragraph with arbitrarily inserted newlines at a certain width. To keep these from turning into <br>s, we want to replace them the right way.

When there is a double new-line, then we know that it really is a new paragraph, and it is OK to keep both newlines together.

Written by Kellen Mace, who lives in Rochester Hills, MI and builds cool stuff on the web. About Kellen // Follow him on Twitter →