Best way to remove whitespaces and linebreaks in PHP

gistfile1.txt

// Sometimes the whitespaces contains bullshit and we need to clean this mess.
// I saw the light here --> http://heavydots.com/blog/when-the-white-space-became-a-beast
// Same with breaklines.

$ascii_whitespaces = chr(194).chr(160);
$ascii_breaklines = chr(13).chr(10);

$to_replace = array ($ascii_whitespaces, $ascii_breaklines);
$replace_to = array (' ', '');

$text = $_POST['text'];  // YOUR TEXT HERE...

//count characters
$chars_entered = strlen(strip_tags(str_replace($to_replace, $replace_to, $text)));