How can line breaks and formatting affect the extraction of data from HTML documents in PHP?

Line breaks and formatting in HTML documents can affect the extraction of data in PHP because they can introduce extra whitespace characters that may interfere with parsing and extracting the desired information. To solve this issue, you can use PHP functions like `trim()` to remove any leading or trailing whitespace, and `preg_replace()` with a regular expression to remove any extra whitespace characters within the extracted data. 

// Example code snippet to extract data from an HTML document with proper formatting handling
$html = '<div>
            <p>   This is some text with extra whitespace.   </p>
            <p>Another paragraph with line breaks and formatting.</p>
        </div>';

// Extract text from HTML document
$extractedData = strip_tags($html); // Strip HTML tags
$extractedData = trim($extractedData); // Remove leading and trailing whitespace
$extractedData = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $extractedData); // Remove extra whitespace characters

echo $extractedData;

Keywords

HTML documents data extraction line breaks formatting PHP

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