In this study, we have focused on finding soliton solutions of the cubic–quartic Fokas–Lenells equation, which models the nonlinear pulse transmission through optical fiber, is a pretty new and updated model. The main motivation of this study is to produce new solutions with previously unused methods for data transmission models in fiber optic cables together with the developing technology, which has been used very frequently today. We have used three different efficient analytical methods, namely, the Sinh–Gordon expansion method, enhanced modified extended tanh expansion method and unified Riccati equation expansion method. By modifying our proposed method and using it effectively, we have obtained much more optical solutions. We have supported the results with the 3D surface, 2D and contour plots of the soliton solutions, such as singular, periodic, periodic-singular, dark and M-shaped solitons. The originality of the method we propose is that it has never been used before. With the innovation of the method, we have obtained M-shaped solitons, which are very rarely obtainable in soliton waves. On the other hand, enhanced modified extended tanh expansion method have provided us more extra solutions. As the last and most important part, in order to examine physical behaviors, we have investigated the effect of the coefficient of the fourth order dispersion parameter on wave propagation by presenting the graphical representation.