unsolvable whitespace problem

vince251

😕This problem is really annoying me... I want to replace every whitespace block with just a single white space, ie:

BLAH1 BLAH2 BLAH3 BLAH4

would be:

BLAH1 BLAH2 BLAH3 BLAH4

thank you =)

kevinsequeira

am i missing something ?? both look the same to me

EDIT : ok understood now

$a = "BLAH1       BLAH2   BLAH3";
should be
$a = "BLAH1 BLAH2 BLAH3";

right ??

reg
kevin

vince251

yup... thats the problem. It really seems like there should be a built in function but I've looked pretty hard and so far found nothing.

kevinsequeira

there might be a better way, but this is what u can use

function remove_blocks($input){
  $array_input = explode(" ",$input);
		// print_r($array_input);
  $count = 0;
  $array_output = array();
  foreach($array_input as $key=>$value){
  	if($array_input[$key]!=""){
  			$array_output[$count] = $value;
  			$array_output[$count+1] = "";
  	}
  	$count = $count+2;
  }
		// print_r($array_output);
  $output = implode(" ",$array_output);
	 return trim($output);
}
//testing
$b = remove_blocks("aa    bb  cc  dd ee");
echo $b;

reg
kevin

maniac1aw

This would be an easy place to use a regular expression:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.eregi-replace.php

<?
$string = "One      Two          Three   Four";

$var = eregi_replace(" +", " ", $string); 

echo $var;

?>

jimson

consider mine also... 🙂

<?php
$str = "BLAH1       BLAH2   BLAH3";
$pat = "(\D )";
$rep = "";
echo preg_replace($pat, $rep, $str);
?>

laserlight

I now use:

$text = ereg_replace("[\r\n\t ]{2,}", " ", $text);

vince251

thank you all... In addition to solving my problem i have also learned much abour php by trying out your insightful suggestions..

My little program is working now so all's good