ctype_space

(PHP 4 >= 4.0.4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

ctype_space — Check for whitespace character(s)

Description

ctype_space(mixed $text): bool

Checks if all of the characters in the provided string, text, creates whitespace.

Parameters

text

The tested string.

Note:
If an int between -128 and 255 inclusive is provided, it is interpreted as the ASCII value of a single character (negative values have 256 added in order to allow characters in the Extended ASCII range). Any other integer is interpreted as a string containing the decimal digits of the integer.

Warning

As of PHP 8.1.0, passing a non-string argument is deprecated. In the future, the argument will be interpreted as a string instead of an ASCII codepoint. Depending on the intended behavior, the argument should either be cast to string or an explicit call to chr() should be made.

Return Values

Returns true if every character in text creates some sort of white space, false otherwise. Besides the blank character this also includes tab, vertical tab, line feed, carriage return and form feed characters. When called with an empty string the result will always be false.

Examples

Example #1 A ctype_space() example

<?php
$strings = array(
    'string1' => "\n\r\t",
    'string2' => "\narf12",
    'string3' => '\n\r\t' // note the single quotes
);
foreach ($strings as $name => $testcase) {
    if (ctype_space($testcase)) {
        echo "The string '$name' consists of whitespace characters only.\n";
    } else {
        echo "The string '$name' contains non-whitespace characters.\n";
    }
}
?>

The above example will output:

The string 'string1' consists of whitespace characters only.
The string 'string2' contains non-whitespace characters.
The string 'string3' contains non-whitespace characters.

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User Contributed Notes 2 notes

down

gardnerjohng at hotmail dot com ¶

15 years ago

A function I wrote last night was fairly flexible in terms of detecting whitespace, and even took into account the pesky non-breaking spaces / zero-width spaces further up the Unicode alphabet.



The benefit here was being able to isolate and identify specific Unicode indices based on their subrange.



<?php

    //    Returns TRUE if the ASCII value of $string matches a registered whitespace character.

    //    *    This includes non-breaking spaces, zero-width spaces, and any unicode values below 32.

    //    *    $string: Character to identify. If string extends past one character, the value

    //        is truncated and only the initial character is examined.

    function is_whitespace($string){

        //    Return FALSE if passed an empty string.

        if($string == "") return FALSE;

        

        $char    =    ord($string);

        

        //    Control Characters

        if($char < 33)                        return TRUE;

        if($char > 8191 && $char < 8208)    return TRUE;

        if($char > 8231 && $char < 8240)    return TRUE;

        

        //    Additional Characters

        switch($char){

            case 160:    // Non-Breaking Space

            case 8287:    // Medium Mathematical Space

                return TRUE;

                break;

        }

        return FALSE;

    }

?>