How Can I Replace Newlines in a String with Single Spaces in PHP?

Eliminating Newlines and Replacing Them with a Single Space

To remove all newlines from a string and replace them with a single empty space, consider the following approach.

Understanding the Problem

You have a string containing newlines and wish to eliminate them while inserting a single space in their place. For example, the string:

$string = "
put returns between paragraphs

for linebreak add 2 spaces at end

";

should become:

$string = "put returns between paragraphs for linebreak add 2 spaces at end ";

Solution

To accomplish this, you can utilize PHP's preg_replace() function along with a regular expression to match and replace the newlines. The following regular expression will identify all newlines, including line breaks (n), carriage returns (r), and double newlines ("rn"):

/\r\n|\r|\n/

However, it's important to note that this approach may replace multiple consecutive newlines with multiple spaces. To avoid this, use a more efficient regular expression that also matches multiple spaces and replaces them with a single space:

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

With this modified regular expression, both single and multiple newlines, as well as multiple spaces, will be replaced with a single space.

Additional Considerations

While the provided solutions effectively eliminate newlines and introduce a single space in their place, it's worth mentioning that the situation can become more complex when multiple consecutive words are involved. For such scenarios, an alternative approach that does not result in double spaces is as follows:

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

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