Remove extra spaces but not space between two words

Question

I want to remove extra spaces present in my string. I have tried trim,ltrim,rtrim and others but non of them are working and even trie

Answer 1

Try this, this will also remove all  

$node3 = htmlentities($node3, null, 'utf-8');
$node3 = str_replace(" ", "", $node3);
$node3 = html_entity_decode($node3);

$node3 = preg_replace('/^\s+|\s+$|\s+(?=\s)/', '', $node3);