What are the best practices for handling whitespace manipulation in PHP to ensure code readability and maintainability?

When handling whitespace manipulation in PHP, it is best to use consistent indentation and spacing throughout your code to ensure readability and maintainability. One common practice is to use spaces instead of tabs for indentation, as tabs can render differently in different editors. Additionally, you can use PHP's built-in functions like trim() to remove leading and trailing whitespace from strings.

// Example of using trim() to remove leading and trailing whitespace
$myString = "   Hello, World!   ";
$trimmedString = trim($myString);
echo $trimmedString; // Output: "Hello, World!"