PHPExcel whitespaces not removed from individual cells

Question

I have an Excel file with values as follows.

 avi|boom|
ben |boom|

I upload the file and use phpExcel to read and get values from each cell. The whitespaces before avi and after ben how do I remove them in php. I tried using the trim function but data is stored in database with whitespaces.

trim($sheet->getCell('B'.$row )->getValue());

data still gets stored with whitespaces.

Answer 1

The additional whitespace is a non-breaking whitespace character (xA0), not a standard value included in php trim(). You can remove it using the following trim modification.

trim(iconv("UTF-8","ISO-8859-1",$sheet->getCell('B'.$row )->getValue())," \t\n\r\0\x0B\xA0");