Question

Why does this not work?

$content=file_get_contents('whatever.txt');
$content=str_replace("\r\n","\n",$content); // Convert linebreaks
$content=str_replace("\n",' ',$content); // Remove linebreaks
$content=preg_replace('/\s+/',' ',$content); // Remove all duplicate spaces
$content=preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z\s]/','',$content); // Remove all non-letters
$content=trim($content);
$content=explode(' ',$content);

Some of the values are still empty spaces:

E.g.

$content[123] = '';

Do I understand something incorrectly? Surely there should be none?

Answer 1

I think that whole thing could be summed up/fixed in these lines:

$content = file_get_contents('whatever.txt'); // Get file
$content = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z\s]/', '', $content); // Strip non-alpha/whitespace
$content = preg_split('/\s+/', $content, NULL, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY); // Split by whitespace and remove empty elements