php - Whitespace in a database field is not removed by trim()

you have to detect these "whitespace" characters first. if it's some HTML entity, like   no trimming function would help, of course.

I'd suggest to print it out like this

echo urlenclde($row['field']);

and see what it says

Well as its A0 (or 160 decimal) non-breaking space character, you can convert it to ordinal space first:

$str = urldecode("%A0")."bla";
var_dump(trim($str));
$str = str_replace(chr(160)," ",$str);
$str = trim($str);
var_dump($str);

and, ta-dam! - 
string(4) " bla"
string(3) "bla"