i was looking for a way to remove excess whitespaces from within a string (that is, if 2 or more spaces are next each other, leave only 1 and remove the others), i found thi
if you want to remove excess of only-spaces (not tabs, new-lines, etc) you could use HEX code to be more specific:
$text = preg_replace('/\x20+/', ' ', $text);
http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.escape.php
defines \h
any horizontal whitespace character (since PHP 5.2.4)
so probably you are looking for
$foo = preg_replace( '/\h+/', ' ', $foo );
example: http://ideone.com/NcOiKW