How to Strip All Spaces Out of a String in PHP

Topic: PHP / MySQLPrev|Next

Answer: Use the PHP str_replace() Function

You can simply use the PHP str_replace() function to strip or remove all spaces inside a string.

Let's take a look at the following example to see how it actually works:

<?php
$str = 'This is a simple piece of text.';
$new_str = str_replace(' ', '', $str);
echo $new_str; // Outputs: Thisisasimplepieceoftext.
?>

The above example will however only remove spaces. If you want to remove all whitespaces including tabs, newlines, etc. you can use the preg_replace() function which perform a regular expression search and replace, as demonstrated in the following example:

<?php
$str = "This is a simple \npiece\tof text.";
$new_str = preg_replace("/\s+/", "", $str);
echo $new_str; // Outputs: Thisisasimplepieceoftext.
?>

In the above example \t represents the tab character, whereas \n represents the newline character.

To learn more about regular expression, see the tutorial on PHP regular expressions.

Related FAQ

Here are some more FAQ related to this topic:

• How to extract substring from a string in PHP
• How to combine two strings in PHP
• How to convert a string to uppercase in PHP