Cleanup Text by Removing Extra Spaces

Removing excessive whitespaces between words

Clean up the text by removing all the white space in a string, such as extra spaces, tabs, newlines, and so on. In the following code, we’ll use preg_replace regex function to clean up the text:

<?php
 $string = "It is   the   sample text   ";
 $newString = preg_replace('/\s+/',' ', $string);
 //It is the sample text

Example: Removing whitespaces but not newlines:

If you need to remove all the white space in a string except the newlines, use the /[^\S\r\n]/ regex pattern:

• \S any character that is not a whitespace character
• \r carriage return
• \n newline

<?php
 $string = 'It   is   the   sample			 text.  
It is   the   sample text.   It is   the   sample text   
It  is   the   sample text.';

 $newString = preg_replace('/[^\S\r\n]+/',' ', $string);
 
 // Printing original text
 echo '<pre>';
 echo nl2br( $string );
 
 // Printing cleaned text
 echo '<hr>';
 echo nl2br( $newString );

The preceding code prints the following output on the web browser:

Removing spaces from the beginning and end of a string

We’ll use ltrim(), rtrim(), or trim(). The ltrim() function removes whitespace (such as newline, carriage return, space, horizontal and vertical tab, and null) from the beginning of a string, rtrim() from the end of a string, and trim() from both the beginning and end of a string.

Example with rtrim() function:

$text = '  hello world  ';
$trimmedText = rtrim($text);
echo $trimmedText;

The above code outputs hello world, trimmed all spaces from the right side.

Example with ltrim() function:

$text = '  hello world  ';
$trimmedText = ltrim($text);
echo $trimmedText;

The above code outputs hello world , trimmed all spaces from the left side.

Example with trim() function:

 $text = '  hello world  ';
$trimmedText = trim($text);
echo $trimmedText;

The above code outputs hello world, trimming all spaces from both sides of the text.

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More Regular Expressions Tutorials: