Remove all spaces, line breaks, and html breaks from a string generated by ckeditor

Question

I have a bunch of textareas that I am currently using ckeditor on, and storing the values in a database. When I get these values back, I want to be able to tell if nothing was entered into a particular textarea. The problem however is that ckeditor likes to put its own markup and other things into the string even if that textarea was not touched.

So, I need to be able to remove all spaces, line breaks, and html breaks from the beginning and end of a string (since we do not want to erase the good data). Here are the strings I am currently trying to trim (var_dumped from an array),

array(3) {
  ["remediation"]=>
  string(26) "


    But not the third
"
  ["effective"]=>
  string(28) "


    Second one is blank
"
  ["celebrate"]=>
  string(6) "
"
}

I have already tried the following: trim, this preg replace, and a number of variations of that preg_replace.

Answer 1

You can just use trim , strip_tags with array_map

$array = array("remediation" => "


    <p> But not the third </p>
","effective" => "


    Second one is blank
","celebrate" => "
");

$array = array_map("strip_tags", $array);
$array = array_map("trim", $array);
var_dump($array);

Output

array
  'remediation' => string 'But not the third' (length=17)
  'effective' => string 'Second one is blank' (length=19)
  'celebrate' => string '' (length=0)