Trim leading white space with PHP?

php whitespace trim

23,524

Solution 1

Strip all whitespace from the left end of the title:
```
<?php echo ltrim(wp_title('')); ?>
```
Strip all whitespace from either end:
```
<?php echo trim(wp_title('')); ?>
```
Strip all spaces from the left end of the title:
```
<?php echo ltrim(wp_title(''), ' '); ?>
```
Remove the first space, even if it's not the first character:
```
<?php echo str_replace(' ', '', wp_title(''), 1); ?>
```
Strip only a single space (not newline, not tab) at the beginning:
```
<?php echo preg_replace('/^ /', '', wp_title('')); ?>
```
Strip the first character, whatever it is:
```
<?php echo substr(wp_title(''), 1); ?>
```

Update

From the Wordpress documentation on wp_title, it appears that wp_title displays the title itself unless you pass false for the second parameter, in which case it returns it. So try:

<?php echo trim(wp_title('', false)); ?>

Solution 2

ltrim()

Solution 3

Just to throw in some variety here: trim

 <body id="<?=trim(wp_title('', false));?>">

Solution 4

Thanks for this info! I was in the same boat in that I needed to generate page ids for CSS purposes based on the page title and the above solution worked beautifully.

I ended up having an additional hurdle in that some pages have titles with embedded spaces, so I ended up coding this:

<?php echo str_replace(' ','-',trim(wp_title('',false))); ?>

Solution 5

ltrim($str)

View more solutions

23,524

Author by

markratledge

https://markratledge.com UpWork https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~0182c4bef18fdc311c WordPress developer, dog walker, ex-carpenter, ex-professor, photographer, writer, etc.

Updated on July 11, 2022

Comments

markratledge almost 2 years

There seems to be a bug in a Wordpress PHP function that leaves whitespace in front of the title of the page generated by <?php echo wp_title(''); ?> I've been through the Wordpress docs and forums on that function without any luck.

I'm using it this way <body id="<?php echo wp_title(''); ?>"> in order to generate an HTML body tag with the id of the page title.

So what I need to do is strip that white space, so that the body tag looks like this <body id="mypage"> instead of this <body id=" mypage">

The extra white space kills the CSS I'm trying to use to highlight menu items of the active page. When I manually add a correct body tag without the white space, my CSS works.

So how would I strip the white space? Thanks, Mark

Part Two of the Epic

John, A hex dump was a good idea; it shows the white space as two "20" spaces. But all solutions that strip leading spaces and white space didn't.

And, <?php ob_start(); $title = wp_title(''); ob_end_clean(); echo $title; ?>

gives me < body id ="">

and <?php ob_start(); $title = wp_title(''); echo $title; ?>

gives me < body id =" mypage">

Puzzle. The root of the problem is that wp_title has optional page title leading characters - that look like chevrons - that are supposed to be dropped when the option is false, and they are, but white space gets dumped in.

Is there a nuclear option?

Yup, tried them both before; they still return two leading spaces... arrgg