How do you strip whitespace from an array using PHP?

Question

I was wondering how can I strip white space from an array using PHP?

Answer 1

You can use a combination of

• array_filter — Filters elements of an array using a callback function
• array_map — Applies the callback to the elements of the given arrays
• trim — Strip whitespace (or other characters) from the beginning and end of a string

Code:

array_filter(array_map('trim', $array));

This will remove all whitespace from the sides (but not between chars). And it will remove any entries of input equal to FALSE (e.g. 0, 0.00, null, false, …)

Example:

$array = array(' foo ', 'bar ', ' baz', '    ', '', 'foo bar');
$array = array_filter(array_map('trim', $array));
print_r($array);

// Output
Array
(
    [0] => foo
    [1] => bar
    [2] => baz
    [5] => foo bar
)

Answer 2

Your question isn't very clear, so I will try to cover almost all cases.

In general, you need to create a function which will do what you need, be it removing the spaces from the left and right of each element or remove the whitespace characters completely. Here's how:

<?php

function stripper($element)
{
    return trim($element); // this will remove the whitespace
                           // from the beginning and the end
                           // of the element
}

$myarray = array(" apple", "orange ", " banana ");
$stripped = array_map("stripper", $myarray);
var_dump($stripped);

?>

Result:

Array
(
    [0] => "apple"
    [1] => "orange"
    [2] => "banana"
)

You can take it from here.