Laravel returning a leading \n character on responses

Question

Every response from my Laravel application seems to be getting prepend with a \n character, even when all I return is a number.

It feels like I have to have introduced this as a bug, but I can't find anywhere where I might have done that. I see I have some other applications I've built in Laravel that have this as well (but others that don't) so after pulling my hair out I thought I'd check and see if this something others have experienced.

The issue is that I'm trying to return an ID and use it but it has this leading character. I could strip it client side, but would rather fix the root issue.

ETA: This route:

Route::get('/test', function(){
    return 'hello world';
});

Produces this response:

It's not an issue for HTML of course, but when I try to assign it as an id, I'm getting "\n 234".

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue and fixed it with phpStorm's global regex search:

[\s\S]\<\?php

In the end I had a new line in the index.php before <?php like mentioned in the other comments

Answer 2

First of all PHEWW! this is a bad issue to end up with.

This can happen when any of your files starting from index.php of public folder to the controller which throws the response. Any where if at all there is a <?php ?> with a new line in between

or

any file involved in route request and response starting with <?php is on any other line than line no.1

Check your

1. public/index.php
2. bootstrap/app.php
3. config/app.php
4. any other files under config folder
5. routes/web.php or routes/api.php
6. app/Http/Controllers/YourController.php

I feel checking these must fix your issue. if not comment below lets discuss!