Answers to this depend on what you mean by "general". It looks at first glance as if application-specific translations have crept into your cleanup rules.

My general-purpose form handling code (yeah, yeah, I should use CGI.pm, but..) does: 

        s/\r\n/\n/g;
        s/\r/\n/g;
Any further translations are done further up the foodchain. In the case of some of my apps, blank lines (e.g., \n\n) between blocks of text are used to delimit paragraphs. Decisions like that are specific enough to warrant leaving them out of general cleanup code. The same goes for collapsing multiple spaces into one.

In reply to Re: Tidying up textarea fields by dws
in thread Tidying up textarea fields by antjock

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