Question

How can I detect all empty spaces in a string that are the result of more than one space key being entered.

In other words I don’t wan to detect this:

" "

But anything greater than that. For example:

"  ", "   ", etc...

Answer 1

You can use regex:

$regex = '~\s{2,}~';
preg_match($regex, $str);

\s includes white space, tabs, and new lines. If you want just spaces, you can change $regex to :

$regex = '~ {2,}~';

---

If you want to remove extra spaces from a string, you can use:

$str = 'hello  there,   world!';

$regex = '~ {2,}~';
$str = preg_replace($regex, ' ', $str);

echo $str;

Outputs:

hello there, world!