I'm trying to get my Perl script to pull newline characters out and put HTML <BR> tags in instead. The idea is that my site's users can post comments that will end up in a text file for SSI inclusion. That part works great but I don't want them to be able to put obscene amounts of blank space in my pages so I want to strip out <BR> tags on otherwise blank lines.

Here's the relevant code: 

# $comment is input from the user via web form

# Fixes multi-line comments to actually be multi-line
$stripvariable = "\n";
$joinvariable = "&ltBR&gt";
@commentlines = split(/$stripvariable/, $comment);
$comment = join($joinvariable,@commentlines);

# This is supposed to eliminate blank lines but it doesn't work
#  $stripvariable = "&ltBR&gt\n&ltBR&gt";
#  $joinvariable = "&ltBR&gt";
#  @commentlines = split(/$stripvariable/, $comment);
#  $comment = join($joinvariable,@commentlines);

# I have no idea why this eliminates those funky rectangle 
# characters from the file but it does.
$stripvariable = "&ltBR&gt";
$joinvariable = "\n&ltBR&gt";
@commentlines = split(/$stripvariable/, $comment);
$comment = join($joinvariable,@commentlines);

[download]

$comment is then formatted and written to a file (this part also works fine).

In reply to HTML String Parsing by Ionizor

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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