I thought that excessive blank lines had been sorted

[#1]

@jaread83

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>

[#2]

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.

[#3]

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..

[#4]

I have reported it to the mods for sorting

[#5]

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).

[#6]

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!).

[#7]

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

[#8]

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

[#9]

Or even further back, just plain old DOS.

[#10]

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.

[#11]

@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.

[#12]

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| /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| /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

[#13]

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.

[#14]

@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.

[#15]

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