Please help - I'm an experienced ASP coder but I'm a raw beginner at PHP. I'm trying to create a function to format text as actual HTML paragraphs, rather than cheating and just inserting "<br />" tags. The function goes like this:

function CleanString($varstring) {
    $varstring = stripslashes($varstring);
    $varstring = '<p>' . $varstring . '</p>';
    $varstring = str_replace("\n", "</p><p>", $varstring);
    $varstring = str_replace("<p></p>", "", $varstring);
    return $varstring;
    }

This works great, with one exception: If there are multiple line breaks, there are multiple sets of empty paragraph tags. That's what I'm trying to correct in the last line of the function, but I'm having no luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

__________________
__________________________________________________ _____________

Confidence is what you feel when you do not truly understand the situation.

Found my solution! The problem was with carriage returns (who knew?):

function CleanString($varstring) {
     $varstring = stripslashes($varstring);
     $varstring = '<p>' . $varstring . '</p>';
     $varstring = str_replace("\r", "\n", $varstring); // the correction
     $varstring = str_replace("\n", "</p><p>", $varstring);
     $varstring = str_replace("<p></p>", "", $varstring);
    return $varstring;
    }

Alternately, there's a slightly more robust solution at http://www.photomatt.net/scripts/autop for anyone experiencing similar trouble.

Confidence is what you feel when you do not truly understand the situation.