php remove from string

Nice quick one for you guys, hope you can help.

After a dodgy CMS I created a while ago, my database is full of product 'names' that have either 1, 2 or 3 spaces before the actual name. This is causing me havoc now and I'm wondering if there's a function that will let me remove these pesky spaces in PHP instead of having to update the 开发者_开发百科database (hundreds of entries).

To make it clearer here's what I'm trying to achieve.

//swap spaces in name for hyphens
$SEOname = str_replace(' ','-',$name);

//works fine on all entries that don't have preceding spaces, but occasionally leads to this
---concrete-fence-posts

Hope you can help.

Thanks.

Use trim():

$SEOname = str_replace(' ','-',trim($name));

The php function trim() (Or TRIM() in SQL)

$str = trim("   HELLO   "); // "HELLO"

or

SELECT TRIM("    HELLO    "); // "HELLO"

If the spaces are not necessary, it would be a good idea to remove them from your database (with a query such as UPDATE table_name SET column_name = TRIM(column_name);

You can use the ltrim function to get rid of the leading spaces from a string as:

$str = ltrim($str);

In your case it would be used as:

$SEOname = str_replace(' ','-',ltrim($name));