Trimming PHP Strings

In programming-speak, trimming a string means removing unwanted characters — typically whitespace characters — from either end (or both ends) of the string. This is useful in a number of scenarios, such as:

• Cleaning up user input, such as text field values in a submitted form
• Removing unwanted line-break characters at the end of a line
• Ensuring that a string is in the correct format for passing to another program

In this article you explore 3 useful PHP functions that you can use to trim strings:

• trim() for trimming both ends of a string
• ltrim() for trimming the beginning of a string, and
• rtrim() for trimming the end of a string.

Trimming a string with trim()

PHP’s trim() function removes all whitespace from the beginning and the end of a string. Here’s an example:

$myString = "
                Hello there!
";

// Displays "Hello there!"
echo trim( $myString );

What is whitespace?

PHP considers the following characters to be whitespace:

• The space character (" ")
• The tab character ("\t")
• The vertical tab character ("\v")
• The newline character ("\n")
• The carriage return character ("\r")
• The null-byte character ("\x0B")

For example:

$myString = " \t\tHello there!\r\n\r\n";

// Displays "Hello there!"
echo trim( $myString );

If you need to trim other characters from the string, you can specify a list of characters to trim as the second argument to trim(). The supplied list replaces the default list of characters. For example, you might want to trim carriage returns and newlines but leave in spaces:

$myString = "\r\r  Hello there!  \n\n";

// Displays "  Hello there!  "
echo trim( $myString, "\r\n" );

You can specify a range of characters using 2-dot (..) notation. The following example trims all space characters and digits:

$myString = "123 Hello there! 456";

// Displays "Hello there!"
echo trim( $myString, " 0..9" );

Trimming either end of a string with ltrim() and rtrim()

PHP’s ltrim() and rtrim() functions work much like trim(), except that they only trim one end of the string:

• ltrim() removes whitespace only from the start of the string, leaving any whitespace at the end of the string intact.
• rtrim() does the opposite: it only removes whitespace from the end of the string.

Here are a couple of examples using ltrim() and rtrim():

$myString = "   Hello there!   ";

// Displays "Hello there!   "
echo ltrim( $myString );

$myString = "123 Hello there! 456";

// Displays "123 Hello there!"
echo rtrim( $myString, " 0..9" );

rtrim() in particular is handy for stripping end-of-line characters from a string that was read from a file:

$myString = "Hello there!\r\n";

// Displays "Hello there!"
echo rtrim( $myString, "\r\n" );

In this article you’ve looked at PHP’s trim(), ltrim() and rtrim() functions for removing unwanted characters around a string. You also learned about whitespace characters, and you saw how to specify your own list of whitespace characters when trimming.

Happy coding!