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Becomes:A filthy narrow bed lies unmade against one wall. On the other a small table on which there's half a loaf of stale bread and a knife.
When the 'bread' link is clicked.A filthy narrow bed lies unmade against one wall. On the other a small table on which there's a knife.
When the knife is taken.A filthy narrow bed lies unmade against one wall. On the other a small table lies empty.
Comments
In this specific case, however, things are a bit more complicated since you want to remove each bit of item text, conjunctions, and replace the entire set with "lies empty" after all items have been removed. As a tradeoff, you could simplify things considerably by making the list of items less integrated with the flow of your descriptive text.
Anyway, for now, something like the following should do what you want: As you can see, that's fairly involved and adding additional items would only complicate things. You could solve most of the logic issues that come with adding additional items by using a temporary variable as an item counter, but you'd still have to deal with the grammatical issues.
I'm going to have to run my head through this before I even begin to understand what's going on, but as always a massive thank you for going to the trouble.