[SOLVED] Remove excess whitespace from within a string

Remove excess whitespace from within a string

I receive a string from a database query, then I remove all HTML tags, carriage returns and newlines before I put it in a CSV file. Only thing is, I can't find a way to remove the excess white space from between the strings.

What would be the best way to remove the inner whitespace characters?

Solution

Not sure exactly what you want but here are two situations:

If you are just dealing with excess whitespace on the beginning or end of the string you can use trim(), ltrim() or rtrim() to remove it.
Since PHP 8.4 mb_trim() is also available.
If you want to remove only excess space characters (" ") within a string, consider the following preg_replace:
```
 $foo = preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', $foo);
```
If you are dealing with extra whitespace within a string, consider using preg_replace to replace multiple whitespace characters ([\r\n\t\f\v ]) with a single space character (" "). Example:
```
 $foo = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $foo);
```
In case you want to deal with each whitespace sequence separately (so two linefeeds won't become a single space):
```
 $foo = preg_replace("/( |\r\n|\n|\r|\v|\t)\\1+/", "$1", $foo)
```
(courtesy this answer)