Question

I have a feeling the answer is “it’s not possible,” but thought I’d ask to satisfy my curiosity.

I have some code that’s echoed where the \n is unavoidable:

echo "Hello \n";
echo "World!";

I’d like the line to simply read (in the code output):

Hello World!

… thus removing the \n.

So I was wondering if it’s possible to execute a “backspace” character during PHP’s output?

Something simple like str_replace( "\n", 'backspace-character', $str );

Answer 1

Yes, the backspace character is ASCII character code 8 (According to the ASCII table), so you can output it in php using chr(). eg:

echo 'ab' . chr(8);

will output “a”