Trim a string purely to text, without leaving any whitespace in PHP? - php

Question

I am having an image upload script, which works fine so far. It runs with jQuery fileupload. The PHP script generates a new name for the uploaded image and gives it out through exit($imgname);. Strangely I always get a response with many whitespaces like you can see in the picture.
To the screenshot:***
My whole website uses jQuery and I thought about using $.trim() to just trim the result to plain text, but I don't know if this is a great idea since I don't think that this works for any common browser.
Additional:
The most strange thing about this is, that it worked in the past just fine without any whitespaces. Today I uploaded something and suddenly it does something like this...
PHP:
$upload = $image->upload();
$imgname = $image->getName();
$imgmime = $image->getMime();
$fullimgname = $imgname . "." . $imgmime;
if($upload){
// POST TO DATABASE ETC.
exit($fullimgname);
}

Answer 1

The white paces may come from somewhere else in the PHP file...
Look for spaces that would be outside the <?php and ?> brackets.
Like this, for example:
// <-- 4 tabs on this line
<?php
$upload = $image->upload();
$imgname = $image->getName();
$imgmime = $image->getMime();
$fullimgname = $imgname . "." . $imgmime;
if($upload){
// POST TO DATABASE ETC.
exit($fullimgname);
}

Answer 2

Try to use regex, because it might consider full unicode charset, etc:
$imgname = preg_replace('/^\s+/u', "", $imgname);
Although it looks likeltrim() should be enough.