How to Remove All Whitespace Characters from a String in PHP?

Eliminating All Whitespace Characters from a String

Many programming languages provide built-in functions for stripping whitespace characters from a string. In PHP, there are two common approaches: using the php_strip_whitespace function or regular expressions with preg_replace.

php_strip_whitespace

Despite its name, the php_strip_whitespace function only removes spaces, tabs, and newlines (n), leaving other whitespace characters untouched (e.g., non-breaking spaces).

Regular Expressions with preg_replace

For a more comprehensive approach, regular expressions can be used to strip all whitespace characters. The following expression replaces any sequence of whitespace characters (s ) with an empty string:

$str = preg_replace('/\s+/', '', $str);

This method effectively eliminates all whitespace characters, regardless of their type.

Advanced Considerations

Note that the regular expression above handles whitespace in the ASCII character set. For UTF-8 strings, a more comprehensive expression is required, as discussed in this related answer:

[Handling whitespace in UTF-8 strings with PHP](https://stackoverflow.com/a/22475166/3005479)

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