I find this function incredibly useful when manipulating or creating images in php (with GD).
I spent quite a while searching through a large number of included files to find where I had a undesired space after php's ending tag - as this was causing all my images on the fly to break due to output already being set. Even more annoying was that this was not caught not php's error reporting so there was no reference to the problem line(s) in my log file. I don't know why error reporting wouldn't catch this since it was set to accept warnings, and the same thing had been caught in the past.
Nevertheless, I never did find the line(s) that were adding extra spaces or new lines before my images were being generated, but what I did instead was add this handy function right before my image manipulation code and right after the include/require code.
For example: