Let's say you have a paragraph of text with all sorts of weird formatting. Maybe it's from someone copying and pasting text into your CMS, or it's just in a weird state. Something like this:
$paragraph = "hello this is a test \n \t just a test and stuff ";

As you can see, it has extra spaces, a newline character, a tab character, and just oddly formatted.
Laravel provides a great solution to this called the squish method on the String helpers.
str($paragraph)->squish();

After running it through squish you'll get all that extra stuff removed:
"hello this is a test just a test and stuff"

Under the hood here is what this method actually does:
/**
* Remove all "extra" blank space from the given string.
*
* @param string $value
* @return string
*/
public static function squish($value)
{
return preg_replace('~(\s|\x{3164}|\x{1160})+~u', ' ', preg_replace('~^[\s\x{FEFF}]+|[\s\x{FEFF}]+$~u', '', $value));
}

Here is an explanation:

• The first preg_replace removes leading and trailing white spaces or BOM characters.
• The second preg_replace replaces one or more consecutive white spaces or special fillers with a single space.

This ensures that you get a string with no extra white spaces.
Prefer to see a video, here is a short Reel I made for the @laravelnews Instagram page covering this:
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Laravel News (@laravelnews)

The post How to remove all extra spaces in a string with Laravel appeared first on Laravel News.
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