How to check an empty string

szms

Suppose I have some bank spaces in an empty sting, how can I chech the bank spaces and print it is really a empty string.

Thnak you.

TheIceman5

and empty string with spaces, trim($string) will make a blank string with spaces = ""

$string = " ";
trim($string) will = ""

szms

Please take a look of the following code. I am getting the output "Different" What kind of string operation I have to do so that I will get "Same". Thank you.

<?php
$name1 = "     Hello          World        ");
$name2 = "Hello World";

print "Before: $name1<br>";
print "Before: $name2<br>";

if ($name1 == $name2)

print "Same";

else
    print "Different";

?>

drawmack

I think the simplest way would be this.

<?php
$ary_str[0] = "     Hello                World            ";
$ary_str[1] = "Hello World";

$i=0;
foreach ($ary_str as $cur_str) {
  $ary_temp = explode(" ",$cur_str);
  $ary_str[$i] = $cur_str;
  $i++;
}

if($ary_str[0] == $ary_str[1]) {
  echo "The Flux Capcitator Works.";
} else {
  echo "No good idea comes from hitting your head on the toilet."
}
?>

laserlight

I think there's also:

function removeExtraSpaces($str) {
	//remove whitespace from start and end
	$str = trim($str);
	//convert whitespace in between to a single space each
	return preg_replace("/[\\\\n\\\\r\\\\t ]+/", " ", $str);
}

then you can simply use this function on your strings.

I used this myself to prevent spoofing of nicknames since extra whitespace is not shown when a page is displayed.

EDIT:
hmm... think there's a bug, so fixed it.

szms

drawmack,

You code does not give me the right output.

laserlight

have you tried my code snippet?

szms

laserlight,

Can you please explain me what's going on in the following trick in your code.

"/[\n\r\t ]+/"

Thank you.

laserlight

They arent really needed here, since \r and \n are the linefeed and newline characters.

basically, the [chars] specify a group of characters to parse with.
The + indicates one or more of such a character belonging to this group.