How to prevent multiple spaces between words in string for being inserted into database

[pioneerx01]

I have registration page where I take school name as one of the fields. Once it is submitted it is checked against existing school names already in table to prevent duplicate registrations. Most schools have more than one word in their name, for example “Sample School.” I had one school that put two spaces between two words and once it was checked against the list it was seen as different name.  How can I make sure that it does not happen again? Is there a simple trick that I do not know, or will I have to do str_replace?

 

Thanks

[.josh]

one method is to strip the extra spaces before they go into the database.

 

Alternatively, at the time of searching, you can split the search word up at the space and join it with a % and do a LIKE query instead of a = query.

 

For example,

 

$search = "Sample School";
$search = preg_replace("~\s+~","%",$search);
$query = "SELECT school FROM tableName WHERE school LIKE '$search'";

This will return the stuff with multiple spaces..but it will return stuff that have anything else inbetween as well, such as "Sample foobar School".

 

If you want to more explicitly only return ones with multiple spaces, you can do a variation of the above, but with a regex approach:

 

$search = "Sample School";
$search = preg_replace("~\s+~",'\s+',$search);
$query = "SELECT school FROM tableName WHERE school REGEXP '$search'";

[priyankagound]

1. If you are just dealing with excess whitespace on the beginning or end of the string you can usetrim(), ltrim() orrtrim() to remove it.

2. `$str = trim(preg_replace('/\s+/',' ', $str);`
    
   This will remove *extra* spaces.