Question

$text =
"<tab><return><nbsp>O'Neil  really  
likes his pudding's, he really really does!!!1.5"

I would like to have this if possible where '<tab>' is an actual tab \t space not literally '<tab>'

$text = "O'Neil really likes his pudding he really really does 1.5"

removing the whites paces and replaces them with one space, the punctuation, keeping the numbers or anything after apostrophe thats not a ‘s’.

Thank you so much!

Answer 1

$string = trim(preg_replace(array('~[:;!?]|[.,](?![0-9])|\'s~', '~\s+~'), array('', ' '), $string));

That first gets rid of 's and then replaces multiple whitespace with one space. Eventually it removes leading and trailing whitespace.