How to combine a multi-line html element into one line?

[pbarney]

I don’t know why I’m having trouble with this, but suppose I have the following:

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, libero turpis non cras ligula, 
id commodo, aenean est in volutpat amet sodales, 
porttitor bibendum facilisi </p>
<p>Donec vivamus. Vel donec et scelerisque vestibulum. 
Condimentum aliquam, mollit magna velit nec, tempor cursus 
vitae sit aliquet neque purus.</p>
<p>Iaculis et dui ullamcorper, non egestas condimentum dui 
phasellus. Sit non mattis a, leo in imperdiet erat nec 
pulvinar. Ornare massa justo</p>
<p>Rhoncus lacinia. Imperdiet nulla sem fringilla, purus 
enim amet, nascetur faucibus, adipiscing neque ut bibendum, 
at felis nec in. Mauris</p>

…and I want to put the contents of each <p> element onto the same line:

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, libero turpis non cras ligula, id commodo, aenean est in volutpat amet sodales, porttitor bibendum facilisi </p>
<p>Donec vivamus. Vel donec et scelerisque vestibulum. Condimentum aliquam, mollit magna velit nec, tempor cursus vitae sit aliquet neque purus.</p>
<p>Iaculis et dui ullamcorper, non egestas condimentum dui phasellus. Sit non mattis a, leo in imperdiet erat nec pulvinar. Ornare massa justo</p>
<p>Rhoncus lacinia. Imperdiet nulla sem fringilla, purus enim amet, nascetur faucibus, adipiscing neque ut bibendum, at felis nec in. Mauris</p>

I have tried something like search: “(<p.*?)(?<!<\/p>)\R +” and replacing it with "\1 ", but besides the fact that it won’t do multiple lines at once (I have to keep repeating the search/replace), the main issue is that if there is a line that starts with a <p> and ends with a </p>, it matches the whole line and whatever comes after it.

What’s the best way to construct this search and replace?

[Mark Olson]

@pbarney

This is a classic case of guy038’s patented “replace in a specific zone of text” regex (follow link for an explanation of how this regex works).

Simply replace (?s-i)(?:<p>|(?!\A)\G)(?:(?!</p>).)*?\K\R with nothing.

Essentially, everything after the \K is what you want to remove, and everything before the \K is ensuring that the replacements only happen within <p> tags.

[Terry R]

@pbarney said in How to combine a multi-line html element into one line?:

What’s the best way to construct this search and replace?

A similar question was posted some time ago here. I suggest reading that. As you seem to be proficient at regex hopefully you can adjust to suit your need.

Terry