Trim whitespace ASCII character "194" from string

Question

Recently ran into a very odd issue where my database contains strings with what appear to be normal whitespace characters but are in fact something else.

For instance, applying trim() to the string:

"TEST "

is getting me:

"TEST "

as a result. So I copy and paste the last character in the string and:

echo ord(' ');
194

194? According to ASCII tables that should be ┬. So I'm just confused at this point. Why does this character appear to be whitespace and how can I trim() characters like this when trim() fails?

Answer 1

It's more likely to be a two-byte 194 160 sequence, which is the UTF-8 encoding of a NO-BREAK SPACE codepoint (the equivalent of the   entity in HTML).

It's really not a space, even though it looks like one. (You'll see it won't word-wrap, for instance.) A regular expression match for \s would match it, but a plain comparison with a space won't; nor will trim() remove it.

To replace NO-BREAK spaces with a normal space, you should be able to do something like:

$string = str_replace("\u{c2a0}", " ", $string);

or

$string = str_replace("\u{c2a0}", "", $string);

to remove them

Answer 2

You can try with :

PHP trim

$foo = "TEST ";
$foo = trim($foo);

PHP str_replace

$foo = "TEST ";
$foo = str_replace(chr(194), '', $foo);

IMPORTANT: You can try with chr(194).chr(160) or '\u00A0'

PHP preg_replace

$foo = "TEST ";
$foo = preg_replace('#(^\s+|\s+$)#', '', $foo);

OR (i'm not sure if it will work well)

$foo = "TEST ";
$foo = preg_replace('#[\xC2\xA0]#', '', $foo);