While this kinda goes against the idea of avoiding polluting the code with symbols, if we're gonna do it, what better than regexp? 

This also risks being too much like a useful command. 

<code>
VAR IZ COCKMONGLED!!/\s//g
</code>

Simply pass the regexp through to whatever function you have available to you to work with them. Clearly this is going to be easier to implement in PHP / Perl / on Unix. I'm not sure if we want the two !! there, it looks good, but it's certainly not necessary for parsing.