Clean Up Redundant Whitespace with Str::squish()

Use Str::squish() to remove duplicate spaces, tabs, and newlines from strings in a single call.

User-submitted text, pasted multi-line addresses, or scraped data frequently contains irregular whitespace, multiple consecutive spaces, and trailing newline characters.

Replacing irregular whitespace manually with complex regular expressions (preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', ...)) is replaced by Laravel's Str::squish() method.

Basic Usage

use Illuminate\Support\Str;

$messyInput = "   Punyapal     Shah   

	  Developer  ";

// Strips all leading, trailing, and duplicate inner whitespace
$clean = Str::squish($messyInput);
// Output: "Punyapal Shah Developer"

Using Fluent String Syntax

$bio = str($request->input('bio'))->squish()->value();

Practical Form Request Cleaning

Pair with prepareForValidation() to sanitize search keywords:

protected function prepareForValidation(): void
{
    if ($this->has('query')) {
        $this->merge([
            'query' => str($this->query)->squish()->value(),
        ]);
    }
}

Summary

• Converts multiple consecutive spaces, tabs, and newlines into a single space.
• Automatically trims leading and trailing whitespace.
• Available as a static helper (Str::squish) and fluent string method (str()->squish()).