Remove empty p tags from WordPress posts

remove-empty-p.php

<?php
add_filter( 'the_content', 'remove_empty_p', 20, 1 );
function remove_empty_p( $content ){
	// clean up p tags around block elements
	$content = preg_replace( array(
		'#<p>\s*<(div|aside|section|article|header|footer)#',
		'#</(div|aside|section|article|header|footer)>\s*</p>#',
		'#</(div|aside|section|article|header|footer)>\s*<br ?/?>#',
		'#<(div|aside|section|article|header|footer)(.*?)>\s*</p>#',
		'#<p>\s*</(div|aside|section|article|header|footer)#',
	), array(
		'<$1',
		'</$1>',
		'</$1>',
		'<$1$2>',
		'</$1',
	), $content );

	return preg_replace('#<p>(\s|&nbsp;)*+(<br\s*/*>)*(\s|&nbsp;)*</p>#i', '', $content);
}

Works great. Thanks for your work!

This works great! I had one issue where a plugin was outputting HTML comments and that was interfering with the regex (#<p>\s*<(div|aside|section|article|header|footer)# doesn't match <p><!--foo--><div>). My solution was to just strip out all of the comments before applying this filter, using this regex <!--(.*?)-->.

Seems WP 4.3 broke this? ANyone else?

Use Jquery : $( 'p:empty' ).remove();

jquery option is the best, add it to custom.js , under jquery document ready function

@kprovance Does not work for me either on WP4.3.1 :(

Worked wonders for me. This will literally save me hours trying to hunt down empty lines.

@ThornedRose it seems to work again in 4.4.1

Wow... this is really awesome. Thanks!

The guy posted this. (You are awesome 👍 )

Glad To Report That It's Still Working

2017 and still working! Awesome work!

Like this

p:empty { display:none; }

Not working for me.. I have a shortcode that outputs a link along with a div container that is hidden with CSS and called when the link is clicked (as a modal). The div container, being a block element, causes the shortcode to end the paragraph early, show the div and then just has the remaining text sort of floating there unwrapped by anything.

So... let's say I have something like this in the tinymce:
Blah blah blah [popup id=5 text="click me to open the popup this should be inline with this blah blah paragraph"] and then the sentence continues.

The HTML output ends up being:

<p>Blah blah blah   </p>
<div id="popup-5" class="popup-modal">click me to open... paragraph</div>
and then the sentence continues.

Was hoping your function would get me output that looked like:
<p>Blah blah blah <div id="popup-5" class="popup-modal">click me to open... paragraph</div> and then the sentence continues.</p>

Any ideas? Thank you!

Wanted to chime in to say 'thank you' for this gist. I was finally fed up with a crappy theme I'm using that aggressively added empty tags every time you hit save on a page. (Going to be moving away from the theme in the future, but gotta get through the next 2 months first). This is/was a life saver.

Adding this jQuery works perfectly fine for me

$('p').each(function() { const $this = $(this); if($this.html().replace(/\s| /g, '').length === 0) $this. Remove(); });

If the p tag is completely empty without space or &nbsp, then this should work
$( 'p:empty' ).remove();