topic Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted in Community Site Feedback

I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Oldjim — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:09:20 GMT

https://community.plus.net/t5/General-Chat/H-D-T-V/m-p/1340819#M202879

Is a quote of the post with the problem

There are numerous lines with

<p>&nbsp;</p>

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:30:17 GMT

I had a script that would remove all of these random blank paragraphs when rendering each post and they would still be visible when editting the post (I can't intercept them betweem posting and saving it in the system) but there was too much outcry over users having control over their own posts so I removed the script entirely. I guess some users feel the need to hit return twice when composing replies or leaving empty paragraphs at the end of their messages. That is fine by me and its down to the users how they wish to compose their messages.

We were looking at removing the empty paragraphs at the end of each post but this was not possible to do so.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:33:59 GMT

I'm not sure how the quoted user added all those blank lines. Resting on the return key? Just kidding. They could always edit their message if after posting it was not formatted correctly.

Or I could put my script back in that removed all blank lines on the rendered message but this would still be displayed on the emails that get generated..

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Oldjim — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:37:14 GMT

I have reported it to the mods for sorting

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Anotherone — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 16:16:26 GMT

Don't you dare put your script back Anyway, I thought Lithium were going to sort out the removal of blank lines at the end of a post (no where else).

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 16:19:25 GMT

No, that would be down me putting a script in to do that.

I found it almost impossible to do consistently and its on my list of enhancements to look at in the future. It's much easier to go through an entire page of posts and remove dead paragraphs than it is to selectively select each post and systematically read the content, work out where the content ends and remove everything after that.

It's on my list and I may need to get someone with advanced knowledge of jQuery to help me out on that when i get round to it (and I'm pretty good with jQuery!).

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Anotherone — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 16:23:49 GMT

Nothing as simple as EOF and remove CR's before it then

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 16:27:36 GMT

thats going back to the days of visual basic with EOF (end of file) lol. If only things were that simple.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Anotherone — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 16:33:49 GMT

Or even further back, just plain old DOS.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 09:11:15 GMT

This is already on my enhancement list so I will be looking into it in the future at some point. Just need to come up with a way to remove the space after the content rather than inbetween.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 10:09:50 GMT

@jaread83 - I know it's not really recommended for HTML but I don't think the document structure will be changing to often so I would be inclined to use a regular expression to do this.

You said you'll be using jQuery so maybe something like this in a replace() :

$string = replace('/<p[^>]*><\\/p[^>]*>/i', '', $string)

This if from the top of the head so may not even work.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 10:16:26 GMT

That would remove all of the empty paragraphs which was universally hated by the test users. What you have provided isn't too far off what I already wrote originally:

    $('p').each(function() {
       var $this = $(this);
       if ($this.html().replace(/\s|&nbsp;/g, '').length == 0)
           $this.remove();
    });

I had been trying to do it in a reverse order and jump from post to post to remove the end tags and this is what I got before giving up becuase it didn't work:

    $(".lia-message-body-content").each(function(){
        // $($("p").reverse()).each(function() {
        $($("p").get().reverse()).each(function() {
            var $this = $(this);
            if ($this.html().replace(/\s|&nbsp;/g, '').length == 0){
            $this.remove();
            console.log('found a match');
            } else {
                 return false;
                 console.log('stop!');
            };
        });
    });

So it's something I have certainly been trying to crack with little luck

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 10:19:39 GMT

As an aside, any empty paragraphs left in posts are displayed like this:

<p>&nbsp;</p>

And that makes it easier to target. The problem is that I need it to only remove the empty paragraphs at the end of a post and leave any in the middle of content as they are which complicates things. I had to concede to let users be sensible with their posts and let mods and admins deal with bad inputs.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:00:24 GMT

@jaread83 - OK I see that would annoy some, so what about removing anything greater than double lines?

s/<p>&nbsp;<\/>{2,}/ /g

And using this you then only need to do it on each .lia-message-body-content.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:03:06 GMT

Problem with that is that some users like to use double spaces (annoying I know). Can't remove them if they were intentional. I need to find a way to only remove the empty paragraphs after the content body. Bit of a head scratcher

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:25:25 GMT

@jaread83 - OK one more thought, what about reverse iterating the <div> tag looking at each <p> element, if this element is 'empty' it can be removed provided it is the last element in the sub tree i.e. the next forward tag would be the </div>, just a thought.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:28:18 GMT

Thats what my second bit of code is attempting to do by using the 'reverse' order working up the DOM. You will see that for each post it is attempting to start at the end and go back looking for empty paragraph tags. Once it reaches something that doesn't match the regex it should return false and then move on to the next post.

Unfortunately my code doesn't work so it needs something else.. I am just unsure what its failing on.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:32:32 GMT

I have added comments to demonstrate what it 'should' do...

    // find each instance of the post message on a page
    $(".lia-message-body-content").each(function(){
        // now within the post message, collect the p tags in reverse order
        $($("p").get().reverse()).each(function() {
            // define context to the p tag
            var $this = $(this);
            // check if the pattern matches <p>&nbsp;</p>
            if ($this.html().replace(/\s|&nbsp;/g, '').length == 0){
            // remove if matches..
            $this.remove();
            console.log('found a match');
            } else {
                 // don't do anything and stop the function if there is content
                 return false;
                 console.log('stop!');
            };
        });
    });

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:34:03 GMT

@jaread83 - Well this works for me.

<html>
<head>
	<meta content="text/html;charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
	<meta content="utf-8" http-equiv="encoding">
	<title>Test</title>
	<style>
		.lia-message-body-content { 
		background-color:red; 
		border:1px solid black ;
		font-size: 18px;
		}
	</style>
	<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.4/jquery.min.js">
	</script>
	<script>
	$(document).ready(function() {
		$(".lia-message-body-content").each(function() {
        	$($("p").get().reverse()).each(function() {
            	var $this = $(this);
            	if ($this.html().replace(/\s|&nbsp;/g, '').length == 0) {
           			$this.remove();
            	} 
            	else {
          	  		return false;
            	}
        	});
    	});
	});
	</script>
</head>
<body>
	<div class="lia-message-body-content">
		<p>Blah</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>Another Paragraph I want to keep</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
	</div>
</body>
</html>

So as to why is doesn't work for you then, I don't know But you might want to fix the return false statement and put it after the console.log('stop') as that is unreachable.

Re: I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

jaread83 — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:42:52 GMT

I will give this a try out on staging and see what happens. Cheers for sparing a bit of your time to help out with this.