PHP Replace and Lowercase

Question

I am trying to do a PHP replace like ASP Replace. The function just returns a blank value though?

    $zonename=mysql_real_escape_string($_POST["zonename"]);
    $zname_clean =""; # blank string
    $zname_clean = $zonename; # fill string with the post form
    $zname_clean = str_replace($zname_clean, " ", ""); # remove white space

That is my code. Example Zonename would be "Header Left", I want to remove capitalization and also remove whitespace.

How can I remove whitespace and convert the case and also is there a cleaner way of doing this?

Answer 1

// strip out all whitespace
$zname_clean = preg_replace('/\s*/', '', $zname_clean);
// convert the string to all lowercase
$zname_clean = strtolower($zname_clean);

See the PHP manual for strtolower() and preg_replace().

Answer 2

You have your parameters in the wrong order. Take a look at this: http://php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php

It should be str_replace(" ", "", $zname_clean);

Another way of doing this is strtolower(trim($zname_clean));