Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours, Third Edition

Manipulating Strings

PHP provides many functions that transform a string argument, subtly or radically.

Cleaning Up a String with trim(), Itrim(), and strip_tags()

When you acquire text from the user or a file, you can’t always be sure that you haven’t also picked up white space at the beginning and end of your data. trim() shaves any white space characters, including newlines, tabs, and spaces, from both the start and end of a string. It accepts the string to be modified, returning the cleaned-up version:

$text = "\t\t\tlots of room to breathe";
$text = trim( $text );
print $text;
// prints "lots of room to breathe";

Of course, this might be more work than you require. You might want to keep white space at the beginning of a string but remove ...