Question

I am trying to remove all extra whitespace characters from a string in php. The string source is from an xml feed of customer reviews.

A few reviews have just too much whitespace and they are showing up in my html! Whether that be… The spacebar being hit too many times, the carriage return, or a newline, I just want a maximum of one space ' ' between characters.

$review = str_replace(array('\n','\r\n',PHP_EOL,'\0','\t'), '', $reviewText[1]);
$review = trim(ereg_replace(' +', ' ', $review));

I have also tried using preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $review); instead of the trim(ereg_replace( line

Despite my best efforts, I still can’t get this invisible whitespace / newline character to disappear.

Any ideas?

I have pasted the review below with xxx to replace any kind of identifying information. This is the output from a var_dump($review);

Here is the review below:

http://www.mangomm.co.uk/test/string.php

Answer 1

rtrim()
ltrim()
trim()

These should do what you’re looking for.

trim('----') should output ”

rtrim('----a----'); should output ‘—-a’

ltrim('----a----'); should output ‘a—-‘

Each hyphen represents a space.

EDIT:

And after I read your post 🙂

Is the new line a break line (<br>, <br /> etc)? print_r doesn’t convert text to htmlentities