PHP String - How To Remove White Spaces from the Beginning and/or the End of a String

There are 4 PHP functions you can use remove white space characters from the beginning and/or the end of a string:

• trim() - Remove white space characters from the beginning and the end of a string.
• ltrim() - Remove white space characters from the beginning of a string.
• rtrim() - Remove white space characters from the end of a string.
• chop() - Same as rtrim().

White space characters are defined as:

• " " (ASCII 32 (0x20)), an ordinary space.
• "\t" (ASCII 9 (0x09)), a tab.
• "\n" (ASCII 10 (0x0A)), a new line (line feed).
• "\r" (ASCII 13 (0x0D)), a carriage return.
• "\0" (ASCII 0 (0x00)), the NULL-byte.
• "\x0B" (ASCII 11 (0x0B)), a vertical tab.

Here is a PHP script example of trimming strings:

<?php
$text = "\t \t Hello world!\t \t ";
$leftTrimmed = ltrim($text);
$rightTrimmed = rtrim($text);
$bothTrimmed = trim($text);
print("leftTrimmed = ($leftTrimmed)\n");
print("rightTrimmed = ($rightTrimmed)\n");
print("bothTrimmed = ($bothTrimmed)\n");
?> 

This script will print:

leftTrimmed = (Hello world!              )
rightTrimmed = (                 Hello world!)
bothTrimmed = (Hello world!)