Remove Duplicate Characters in Strings With Laravel

If you need to remove string duplication in Laravel and PHP applications, Laravel v11.20 adds a new method named deduplicate to the String helpers, which allows you to quickly and easily remove duplicate characters.

use Illuminate\Support\{Str,Stringable};
 
$string = '/usr/local////path/to///desktop';
 
Str::deduplicate($string, '/');
// "/usr/local/path/to/desktop"
 
(new Stringable($string))->deduplicate('/')->toString();
// "/usr/local/path/to/desktop"

The default replacement character in the deduplicate() method is a space character, which could also be a use for the squish() helper introduced in Laravel v9.7.0. Let me illustrate when squish() might be a better choice to remove extra spaces:

Str::deduplicate(' John     Smith Jr.  '); // " John Smith Jr. "
Str::squish(' John     Smith Jr.  '); // "John Smith Jr."

Note the extra space ' ' characters at the beginning and end using deduplicate(), which is by design. Deduplicate is used to replace consecutive instances of a given character with a single character in the given string. Squish also removes other space characters, such as newlines and tabs:

// Each example returns `laravel php framework`:
Str::squish(' laravel php framework '));
Str::squish("laravel\t\tphp\n\nframework");
Str::squish('
    laravel
    php
    framework
');