Question

I’m working on transferring data from one database to another. For this I have to map some values (string) to integers and this is where I run into a strange problem.

The string looks like this $string = “word anotherword”; so two words (or one space).
When I explode the string or count the amount of spaces it misses the white space. Why? I var_dumped the variable and it says it’s a string.

Below is the code i’m using.

echo "<strong>Phases</strong>: ".$fases = mapPhase($lijst[DB_PREFIX.'projectPhase']);

The string that’s being send to the function is for example “Design Concept”. This calls the following function (where the spaces get ignored)

function mapPhase($phases){
    echo "Whitespace amount: ".substr_count($phases, ' ')."<br />";
}

For the example string given this function echoes 0. What’s causing this and how can i fix it? The strangest thing is that for one instance the function worked perfectly.

Answer 1

It may well be that the alleged space in the string may not be a space as in ‘ ‘, but something similar, which gets rendered in the browser in the same way as ‘ ‘ would. (for a rudimentary list of possible characters: http://php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php)

Thus, checking what the whitespace exactly is may be the solution to that problem.