There are numerous methods to remove unwanted spaces from a String. Laravel uses the squish() method to remove all remove extra whitespaces and extra characters from a string. Suppose a long string has multiple consecutive spaces, tab and newline characters you need to format. You can simply pass the squish function to that string as shown below.
$para = "This is a \n \t string with spaces.";
str($para)->squish();The function gives the output shown below.
This is a string with spaces.
This method will use the php string function preg_replace() in Laravel to replace or remove the set of unwanted characters or spaces from a String. The built-in Laravel function works as shown below.
public static function squish($value)
{
return preg_replace('~(\s|\x{3164}|\x{1160})+~u', ' ', preg_replace('~^[\s\x{FEFF}]+|[\s\x{FEFF}]+$~u', '', $value));
}The preg_replace() function is useful for removing multiple whitespaces or even consecutive spaces from a string.
In the code snippet above, the first use of it removes all leading and trailing whitespaces and BOM (byte order mark) characters.
The second use of preg_replace will replace all special fillers and unwanted whitespaces with a single space.
