To strip whitespaces inside a variable in PHP

Question

How can you strip whitespaces in PHP's variable?

I know this comment PHP.net. I would like to have a similar tool like tr for PHP such that I can run simply

tr -d " " ""

I run unsuccessfully the function php_strip_whitespace by

$tags_trimmed = php_strip_whitespace($tags);

I run the regex function also unsuccessfully

$tags_trimmed = preg_replace(" ", "", $tags);

Answer 1

$string = str_replace(" ", "", $string);

I believe preg_replace would be looking for something like [:space:]

Answer 2

If you want to remove all whitespaces everywhere from $tags why not just:

str_replace(' ', '', $tags);

If you want to remove new lines and such that would require a bit more...

Answer 3

To strip any whitespace, you can use a regular expression

$str=preg_replace('/\s+/', '', $str);