PHP: Replace unknown characters with regular expressions

Question

I'm working with texts that, in some cases, have extra spaces within words. For example:

Marshawn Lynch is amazing. A M A Z I N G!

I want to collapse the "A M A Z I N G" part into one word, so that the final result looks like:

Marshawn Lynch is amazing. AMAZING!

I'm working with PHP, and I'm trying to figure out a way to use preg_replace (maybe there's a better way of doing it?), but I can't figure out where to start.

You need to provide more samples of what you're trying to detect. For example, you probably don't want to collapse That's a B movie. to get That's aB movie. or even That'saB movie. So, what are you really trying to do? And what have you tried? — elixenide
– elixenide, Commented Feb 12, 2016 at 14:00
How will you differentiate between spaces within words and spaces between words? Are the words with embedded spaces always upper case? Is this a real world problem or an exercise? — BryanT
– BryanT, Commented Feb 12, 2016 at 14:00

Jan · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-12 16:49:36Z

0

This one looks for whitespaces between two UPPERCASE letters and replaces all occurences:

$string = "Marshawn Lynch is amazing. A M A Z I N G!";
$regex = "~(?<=[A-Z])\s(?=[A-Z])~";
$string = preg_replace($regex, "", $string);
echo $string;
// output: Marshawn Lynch is amazing. AMAZING!

See a demo on ideone.com.

edited Feb 12, 2016 at 16:49

answered Feb 12, 2016 at 14:08

Jan

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