Remove Whitespace and Newline Characters in Bash

Bash function that removes whitespace and newline character from a string of text.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

##
# Removes whitespace and newline characters
#
# Examples:
#
# $ strip "some words with spaces"
# somewordswithspaces
#
# $ echo "some words with spaces" | strip
# somewordswithspaces
##
strip() {
    local arg

    if [[ -z $1 ]]; then
        read -r arg
    else
        arg=$1
    fi

    echo "$arg" | tr -d ' \r\n\t'
}