php: how to remove starting blanks and new lines

Question

I have a string,

"

     it is a dog"

How to remove the starting blanks and the new lines? The output should be:

"it is a dog"

I have tried preg_replace("/^\s*/ms", "", $string), but not works.

If trim not working then look here,http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4166896/trim-unicode-whitespace-in-php-5-2 — Tarun, Sep 08 '12 at 11:19

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 08 '12 at 11:15

2

Try ltrim (http://php.net/ltrim).

answered Sep 08 '12 at 11:15

Aleph

1,209
10
19

Notice that my answer is about ltrim and not about trim. The author did not ask for trim, but did for ltrim (since he/she only wanted to remove the starting whitespace). As rekire also mentioned, remove the second parameter. It is set to all whitespace by default. – Aleph Sep 08 '12 at 11:20

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 08 '12 at 11:18

Use trim.

examples from php.net:

$text   = "\t\tThese are a few words :) ...  ";
$binary = "\x09Example string\x0A";
$hello  = "Hello World";
var_dump($text, $binary, $hello);

print "\n";

$trimmed = trim($text);
var_dump($trimmed);

$trimmed = trim($text, " \t.");
var_dump($trimmed);

$trimmed = trim($hello, "Hdle");
var_dump($trimmed);

$trimmed = trim($hello, 'HdWr');
var_dump($trimmed);

// trim the ASCII control characters at the beginning and end of $binary
// (from 0 to 31 inclusive)
$clean = trim($binary, "\x00..\x1F");
var_dump($clean);

The above example will output:

string(32) "        These are a few words :) ...  "
string(16) "    Example string
"
string(11) "Hello World"

string(28) "These are a few words :) ..."
string(24) "These are a few words :)"
string(5) "o Wor"
string(9) "ello Worl"
string(14) "Example string"

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 08 '12 at 11:16

0

You could try this:

$string = str_replace(array("\r", "\n"), '', trim($string));

answered Sep 08 '12 at 11:16

mewm

1,227
10
13

this will remove all the new lines, not only the starting new lines. – Evan Lee Sep 08 '12 at 11:19

php: how to remove starting blanks and new lines

3 Answers3