How to Effectively Strip Whitespace Characters from a String in PHP?

Stripping Whitespace Characters from a String in PHP

The removal of whitespace characters from a string is a common programming task. In PHP, this can be accomplished using various methods.

One unsuccessful approach is to employ the php_strip_whitespace function, which does not seem to function as intended. Another attempt using the preg_replace function with a simple expression to target whitespace (" ") also proved unsuccessful.

To effectively strip all whitespace characters, regardless of their type or encoding, a more robust regular expression is required:

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

This expression employs the s pattern, which matches one or more sequences of whitespace characters. By replacing these matches with an empty string, all whitespace is removed from the input string $str.

UTF-8 whitespace characters can also be handled using the following approach:

// Handle UTF-8 whitespace characters
$str = iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//IGNORE', $str);
$str = preg_replace('/\s+/', '', $str);
$str = iconv('ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8', $str);

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