Remove multiple whitespaces

user_238444 0
Viewed 262329

I'm getting $row['message'] from a MySQL database and I need to remove all whitespace like \n \t and so on.

$row['message'] = "This is   a Text \n and so on \t     Text text.";

should be formatted to:

$row['message'] = 'This is a Text and so on Text text.';

I tried:

 $ro = preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ',$row['message']);
 echo $ro;

but it doesn't remove \n or \t, just single spaces. Can anyone tell me how to do that?

preg-replace whitespace php regex string
15 Answers

You need:

$ro = preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $row['message']);

You are using \s\s+ which means whitespace(space, tab or newline) followed by one or more whitespace. Which effectively means replace two or more whitespace with a single space.

What you want is replace one or more whitespace with single whitespace, so you can use the pattern \s\s* or \s+ (recommended)

user_2276650 
<?php
$str = "This is  a string       with
spaces, tabs and newlines present";

$stripped = preg_replace(array('/\s{2,}/', '/[\t\n]/'), ' ', $str);

echo $str;
echo "\n---\n";
echo "$stripped";
?>

This outputs

This is  a string   with
spaces, tabs and newlines present
---
This is a string with spaces, tabs and newlines present
user_2636710 
$str='This is   a Text \n and so on Text text.';
print preg_replace("/[[:blank:]]+/"," ",$str);
user_1315270

I can't replicate the problem here:

$x = "this    \n \t\t \n    works.";
var_dump(preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $x));
// string(11) "this works."

I'm not sure if it was just a transcription error or not, but in your example, you're using a single-quoted string. \n and \t are only treated as new-line and tab if you've got a double quoted string. That is:

'\n\t' != "\n\t"

Edit: as Codaddict pointed out, \s\s+ won't replace a single tab character. I still don't think using \s+ is an efficient solution though, so how about this instead:

preg_replace('/(?:\s\s+|\n|\t)/', ' ', $x);
nickf_90210
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