Counting Characters in PHP

<?php
$f = "test.txt";
 
// get string
$str = file_get_contents($f);
 
// count characters
$numChar = strlen($str);
echo "This file has ". $numChar . " character(s)";
 
// count characters without spaces
$str2 = ereg_replace('[[:space:]]+', '', $str);
$numChar = strlen($str2);
echo "This file has ". $numChar . " character(s) without spaces";
 
// count words
$numWords = str_word_count($str);
echo "This file has ". $numWords . " words";
 
?>