CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpencodingspacetrim
Horse
Horse

Reputation: 3063

PHP trim and space not working

I have some data imported from a csv. The import script grabs all email addresses in the csv and after validating them, imports them into a db.

A client has supplied this csv, and some of the emails seem to have a space at the end of the cell. No problem, trim that sucker off... nope, wont work.

The space seems to not be a space, and isn't being removed so is failing a bunch of the emails validation.

Question: Any way I can actually detect what this erroneous character is, and how I can remove it?

Not sure if its some funky encoding, or something else going on, but I dont fancy going through and removing them all manually! If I UTF-8 encode the string first it shows this character as a:

Â

Upvotes: 15

Views: 35917

Answers (5)

Thanasis
Thanasis

Reputation: 449

Replace all UTF-8 spaces with standard spaces and then do the trim!

$string = preg_replace('/\s/u', ' ', $string);
echo trim($string)

This is it.

Upvotes: 11

Slipstream
Slipstream

Reputation: 14812

In most of the cases a simple strip_tags($string) will work.

If the above doesn't work, then you should try to identify the characters resorting to urlencode() and then act accordingly.

Upvotes: 1

Rid Iculous
Rid Iculous

Reputation: 3962

I had a similar problem, also loading emails from CSVs and having issues with "undetectable" whitespaces.

Resolved it by replacing the most common urlencoded whitespace chars with ''. This might help if can't use mb_detect_encoding() and/or iconv()

    $urlEncodedWhiteSpaceChars   = '%81,%7F,%C5%8D,%8D,%8F,%C2%90,%C2,%90,%9D,%C2%A0,%A0,%C2%AD,%AD,%08,%09,%0A,%0D';
    $temp = explode(',', $urlEncodedWhiteSpaceChars); // turn them into a temp array so we can loop accross
    $email_address  = urlencode($row['EMAIL_ADDRESS']);
        foreach($temp as $v){
            $email_address  =  str_replace($v, '', $email_address);     // replace the current char with nuffink
        }
        $email_address = urldecode($email_address); // undo the url_encode

Note that this does NOT strip the 'normal' space character and that it removes these whitespace chars from anywhere in the string - not just start or end.

Upvotes: 3

Sven
Sven

Reputation: 70933

If that "space" is not affected by trim(), the first step is to identify it.

Use urlencode() on the string. Urlencode will percent-escape any non-printable and a lot of printable characters besides ASCII, so you will see the hexcode of the offending characters instantly. Depending on what you discover, you can act accordingly or update your question to get additional help.

Upvotes: 44

Mateusz Nowak
Mateusz Nowak

Reputation: 4121

I see couples of possible solutions

1) Get last char of string in PHP and check if it is a normal character (with regexp for example). If it is not a normal character, then remove it.

$length = strlen($string);
$string[($length-1)] = '';

2) Convert your character from UTF-8 to encoding of you CSV file and use str_replace. For example if you CSV is encoded in ISO-8859-2

echo iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-2', "Â");

Upvotes: 0

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