str_replace problems

[corporateboy]

I have a whole bunch of names in the following

$who="michael,katrina,tim,lance";

and the like.

What im doing is putting them in alphabetical order, i use sort() and its all good.

Here is the problem. sometimes there is a space between names
like

katrina, michael

of course sort returns the space character as the first, even when the name following should not have that!

So either, how do I strip the first character of an array element if it is a space? Is it something like

if($who[0][0]==" "){somehow delete the first character or str_replace the space)

Ive been trying to str_replace(", ", ",",$who)

but it keeps returning a parse error (why did i use commas in the first place ARRRRRGGGH).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

mike

[corporateboy]

I had a bug in my syntax, its all working now =)

[mithril]

You could also look at trim(), ltrim(), and rtrim(). Those functions are designed to do axactly what you're talking about.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ltrim.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.rtrim.php

-geoff

[[deleted]]

indeed.

and if you combine them with array_walk() your can do those operations on the entire array at once.