String Cleaning with Laravel's remove Method

String Cleaning with Laravel's remove Method

Need to remove certain characters from your strings? Laravel's Str::remove method provides a straightforward way to clean up text content.

Basic Usage

Remove specific characters from a string:

use Illuminate\Support\Str;

$string = 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.';
$removed = Str::remove('e', $string);
// Result: "Ptr Pipr pickd a pck of pickld ppprs."

// Case-insensitive removal
$removed = Str::remove('P', $string, false);
// Result: "eter ier icked a eck of ickled eers."

Real-World Example

Here's how you might use it in a text processing service:

class TextCleaner
{
    public function cleanupPhoneNumber(string $phone)
    {
        return Str::remove(['-', ' ', '(', ')'], $phone);
    }

    public function removeSpecialCharacters(string $text)
    {
        $characters = ['@', '#', '$', '%', '^', '&', '*'];
        return Str::remove($characters, $text);
    }

    public function sanitizeUsername(string $username)
    {
        // Remove common special characters and spaces
        $cleaned = Str::remove([
            ' ', '.', '-', '_', '@', 
        ], $username);
        
        return strtolower($cleaned);
    }

    public function cleanupCSVContent(string $content)
    {
        // Remove invisible characters
        return Str::remove([
            "\r", "\n", "\t", "\0", "\x0B"
        ], $content);
    }
}

// Usage
class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function store(Request $request, TextCleaner $cleaner)
    {
        $phone = $cleaner->cleanupPhoneNumber($request->phone);
        $username = $cleaner->sanitizeUsername($request->username);

        User::create([
            'phone' => $phone,
            'username' => $username
        ]);
    }
}

The remove method simplifies string cleaning operations, making your text processing code more readable and maintainable.

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