remove whitespace

Hi - I suspect there is a function to do this, but I can't find it. I want to remove extraneous whitespace-like characters from a string, so "this is\n a \t string with \nweird spacing" becomes "this is a string with weird spacing" best I can come up with is to use str_replace() to turn all the unwanted chars into plain " "s, then explode() and implode() the string. Is there a faster way?