Comments on: Removing typographic widows in WordPress page titles

By: Phil Thompson

Phil Thompson — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:06:03 +0000

Thanks for the code suggestion – James. I didn’t even contemplate using a regex but it does make sense to.

A great addition to your code would be a regex that checked for the last space that comes before each closing block level tags (like p, li, h1-6, etc) which could then be applied to WordPress’s the_content() function and could eliminate widows from the body copy too.

By: James

James — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:23:44 +0000

I would just use a regular expression for this:

preg_replace( “/\s(?=\S+$)/”, “ ”, $title );

The regular expression:

\s(?=\S+$)

Looks for a space (\s), and then does a look-ahead ( (?=…) ) for a string of non-space characters (\S+) followed by the end-of-string boundary ($). This pattern will only be satisfied by the last space in any string, and so will therefore replace:

“this is a title”

with:
“this is a title”