How to replace   with a space?

Question

I am creating some code to auto-generate a meta-desc for product pages in VM.

I have stripped tags, but I am still seeing &nbsp in the resulting text.

The code I have at present is:

if ($product->metadesc) {
    $document->setDescription($product->metadesc);
} else {
    $document->setDescription(strip_tags("Buy ".$category->category_name." | ".$product->product_name." | ".$product->product_desc));
}

So for example, this produces:

Buy T-Shirts | PTB Keep Calm | PTB Keep Calm This creative design is printed  on a Premium Fitted CVC Crew Tee  Features:60% combed rin...

Is there anything I can do to remove these non-breaking space entities?

Answer 1

html_entity_decode(), as suggested by Lodder, is a suitable function call. If you wish to "mop up" consecutive spaces, a simple, broad sweeping regex call will do the trick.

*I have added the unicode pattern modifier for maximum replacement coverage.

Demo:

$category = new stdClass();
$category->category_name = 'T-Shirts';
$product = new stdClass();
$product->product_name = 'PTB Keep Calm';
$product->product_desc = 'PTB Keep Calm This creative design is printed  on a Premium Fitted CVC Crew Tee  Features:60% combed rin...';

$decoded = strip_tags(html_entity_decode("Buy " . $category->category_name." | ".$product->product_name." | ".$product->product_desc));
echo $decoded;

echo "\n---\n";

echo preg_replace('~\s+~u', ' ', $decoded);

Output:

Buy T-Shirts | PTB Keep Calm | PTB Keep Calm This creative design is printed  on a Premium Fitted CVC Crew Tee  Features:60% combed rin...
---
Buy T-Shirts | PTB Keep Calm | PTB Keep Calm This creative design is printed on a Premium Fitted CVC Crew Tee Features:60% combed rin...

---

Of course, if you don't have any other entities to decode and you want to condense spaces, you could just use regex.

echo preg_replace('~(?:\s| )+~u', ' ', strip_tags("Buy " . $category->category_name." | ".$product->product_name." | ".$product->product_desc));