How to remove more than one whitespace character from HTML? - html

Question

I want to remove extra whitespace which is coming from the user end, but I can't predict the format of the HTML.
For example:
<p> It's interesting that you would try cfsetting, since nothing in it's
documentation would indicate that it would do what you are asking.
Unless of course you were mis-reading what "enableCFoutputOnly" is
supposed to do.
</p>
<p>
It's interesting that you would try cfsetting, since nothing in it's
documentation would indicate that it would do what you are asking.
Unless of course you were mis-reading what "enableCFoutputOnly" is
supposed to do.</p>
Please guide me on how to remove more than one whitespace character from HTML.

Answer 1

You could use regex to replace any cases of multiple whitespace characters with a single space by looping over the result until no more multiple whitespace occurances exist:
lastTry = "<p> lots of space </p>";
nextTry = rereplace(lastTry,"\s\s", " ", "all");
while(nextTry != lastTry) {
lastTry = nextTry;
nextTry = REReplace(lastTry,"\s\s", " ", "all");
}
Tested working in CF10.

Answer 2

if you don't want to do it thru code out of total lazyness
=> http://jsbeautifier.org/
if you want to do it by code then a regex would be another option

Answer 3

This should do it:
<cfscript>
string function stripCRLFAndMultipleSpaces(required string theString) {
local.result = trim(rereplace(trim(arguments.theString), "([#Chr(09)#-#Chr(30)#])", " ", "all"));
local.result = trim(rereplace(local.result, "\s{2,}", " ", "all"));
return local.result;
}
</cfscript>