In the context of PHP, how can the trim function be utilized to address problems caused by leading or trailing spaces in URLs before processing them?
When dealing with URLs in PHP, leading or trailing spaces can cause issues such as broken links or incorrect routing. To address this problem, the trim function can be used to remove any leading or trailing spaces from the URL before processing it.
$url = " http://example.com/page1 ";
$cleaned_url = trim($url);
// $cleaned_url now contains "http://example.com/page1"
// Proceed with processing the cleaned URL