Discussion on:

Transform plain text files into Web pages automatically with this PHP script

1. Why remove extra spaces? What's the point of that? Display by a browser automatically reduces additional whitespace so that only a single space is displayed. It's part of the (X)HTML standard. That's a waste of a line of code.

2. I can understand the header and footer code for generating static HTML pages, but if all you're going to do is echo the content of your variable to the browser, you might as well just add the headers and footers at the beginning and ending of the script as it is. Alternatively, you can separate functionality for reuse by other scripts, and just echo the actual main body text, then have a separate file with the headers and footers as a static part of that other file and an include() or require() statement to call your text formatting file.

It is true that you get a lot of gargbage when you use Word to save a document in HTML format. However, the HTML page usually looks pretty clean when viewed in a browser (at least it does when viewed in IE...go figure). But if you ever want to maintain it or add or remove something from the HTML, you have to struggle through all the extra tags that Word creates. You could try saving to a text document then applying the rules that Mr. Kaelin referred to at the beginning of this discussion.