I am trying to remove all extra whitespace characters from a string in php. The string source is from an xml feed of customer reviews.
A few reviews have just too much whitespace and they are showing up in my html! Whether that be... The spacebar being hit too many times, the carriage return, or a newline, I just want a maximum of one space ' ' between characters.
$review = str_replace(array('
','
',PHP_EOL,'\0','\t'), '', $reviewText[1]);
$review = trim(ereg_replace(' +', ' ', $review));
I have also tried using preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $review); instead of the trim(ereg_replace( line
Despite my best efforts, I still can't get this invisible whitespace / newline character to disappear.
Any ideas?
I have pasted the review below with xxx to replace any kind of identifying information. This is the output from a var_dump($review);
Here is the review below:
These should do what you're looking for.
trim('----') should output ''
rtrim('----a----'); should output '----a'
ltrim('----a----'); should output 'a----'
Each hyphen represents a space.
EDIT:
And after I read your post :)
Is the new line a break line (<br>, <br /> etc)? print_r doesn't convert text to htmlentities
ereg_* functions are deprecated. Dont use them.
The following regex should work
preg_replace('/[[:space:]]+/', ' ', $review);
[:space:] matches white space characters. In the "C" and "POSIX" locales, these are space, form-feed (\f), newline (), carriage return (), horizontal tab (\t), and vertical tab (\v)