How to replace multiple spaces from a string in PHP

Posted on August 29, 2008, under PHP, Bookmark it

This snippet is useful when you need to replace multiple spaces from a string. Tabs, New Lines and Carriages are also replaced.

<?php
function replace_multiple_spaces($string)
{
	// tabs, new lines and carriages are also replaced
$string = ereg_replace("[ \t\n\r]+", " ", $string);

return $string;
}

$string = "This
   is
a   dummy
text. ";

$new_string = replace_multiple_spaces($string);

// Outputs: This is a dummy text
echo $new_string;
?>

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August 29, 2008
article by Gabriel C.
2 comments

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2 Replies to "How to replace multiple spaces from a string in PHP"

Lex
May 20, 2010 at 5:23 PM

Reply

ereg_replace is almost deprecated from PHP, better to use preg_replace instead. And even when you will change to preg_replace this code will be 5 times slower than

while (strpos(‘ ‘, $string) !== false) $string = str_replace(‘ ‘, ‘ ‘, $string);

So the main idea is: “When you can write your code in a couple of lines without regular expressions – do it.”
Flanker
March 10, 2011 at 12:05 AM

Reply

I agree with the last sentence, but strpos(‘ ‘, $string) !== false is incorrect (because strpos can return also 0 or null), it is better while (strpos(‘ ‘, $string)). I do not understand what do the last command: str_replace(‘ ‘, ‘ ‘, $string).

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How to replace multiple spaces from a string in PHP

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2 Replies to "How to replace multiple spaces from a string in PHP"

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