Remove trailing newline

Question

I've a MySQL database from which I extract a string which is a list of words separated by newline. Now I want to remove only the trailing newline.

I tried using preg_replace as

$string = preg_replace('/\n/','',$string); 

It works, but all the newlines in the strings are removed :(

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You need to add the end of line anchor:

$string = preg_replace('/\n$/','',$string); 

It's better to avoid regular expressions for such a simple substitution. This can easily be done using rtrim as:

$string = rtrim($string); 

rtrim without the second argument will remove the trailing whitespace characters which include:

• newline
• space
• vertical tab
• horizontal tab
• carriage return

Answer 2

Don't use regular expressions for such a trivial task. You can use PHP's rtrim() (possibly with "\n" as the second parameter) or substr() (like substr($string, 0, -1)) or MySQL's RTRIM().