replacing spaces with just one "_"

Question

I'm trying to replace all of the consecutive spaces with just one underscore; I can easily replace one space with "_" by using the following line of code:

str_replace(" ", "_",$name);

Evan I can replace one spaces with "_" by following line of code:

str_replace("  ", "_",$name);

But the problem is I don't know how many blank spaces I have to check!

If my question is not clear please let me know which part you need more clarification.

Thanks

possible duplicate of [php Replacing multiple spaces with a single space](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2368539/php-replacing-multiple-spaces-with-a-single-space) — dang, Oct 22 '13 at 13:32

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 22 '13 at 13:29

6

Probably the cleanest and most readable solution:

preg_replace('/[[:space:]]+/', '_', $name);

This will replace all spaces (no matter how many) with a single underscore.

answered Oct 22 '13 at 13:29

subZero

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This will replace spaces with dashes, not underscores. – Glitch Desire Oct 22 '13 at 13:31
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can also use preg_replace('/\s+/', '_', $name); – xlordt Oct 22 '13 at 13:34
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@xlordt Except that'd also replace tabs and line breaks. – h2ooooooo Oct 22 '13 at 13:34
Correct, but who knows.. maybe he will come back and realize that this is what he needed lol. – xlordt Oct 22 '13 at 13:37

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 22 '13 at 13:29

You can accomplish this with a regular expression:

[ ]+

This will match "one or more space characters"; if you want "any whitespace" (including tabs), you can instead use \s+.

Using this with PHP's preg_replace():

$name = preg_replace('/[ ]+/', '_', $name);

h2ooooooo · Answer 3 · 2013-10-22T13:34:13.927

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Use preg_replace():

$name = preg_replace('/ +/', '_', $name);

+ in regex means "repeated 1 or more times" hence this will match [SPACE] as well as [SPACE][SPACE][SPACE].

edited Oct 22 '13 at 13:34

answered Oct 22 '13 at 13:29

h2ooooooo

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 22 '13 at 13:29

0

You can use regular expressions:

$name = preg_replace("#\s+#", "_", $name);

answered Oct 22 '13 at 13:29

Guillaume Poussel

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replacing spaces with just one "_"

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