Remove excess whitespace from a string in PHP

This article demonstrates how to remove excess whitespace from a string in PHP.

You can remove excess whitespace from a string using a regular expression. In order to replace one or more whitespace characters with a single whitespace character, you can use the regex \s+. The \s matches a single whitespace character, including space, tab, form feed, line feed, and other Unicode spaces, and the + matches the preceding item 1 or more times. Therefore, the pattern \s+ matches 1 or more whitespace characters.

The following solution replaces the consecutive whitespace characters with a single space using the preg_replace() method. Note that it does not remove leading and trailing whitespace characters from the string.

<?php

$text = ' Brooklyn St, NY,

14001';

$result = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $text);

echo "\"$result\"";

Output: " Brooklyn St, NY, 14001"

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If you want to strip all whitespace from the beginning or the end of a string, you can use the ltrim() and rtrim() functions, respectively. To remove both leading and trailing whitespace from a string, consider using the trim() function. The following code removes extra spaces, along with all leading and trailing spaces.

<?php

$text = ' Brooklyn St, NY,

14001';

$result = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', trim($text));

echo "\"$result\"";

Output: "Brooklyn St, NY, 14001"

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That’s all about removing excess whitespace from a string in PHP.

Remove excess whitespace from a string in PHP

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