I want to replace all occurrences of white space characters (space, tab, newline) in JavaScript.
How to do so?
I tried:
str.replace(/ /gi, "X") 
- 1regular-expressions.infoFelix Kling– Felix Kling2011-06-28 13:42:23 +00:00Commented Jun 28, 2011 at 13:42
- 1What is "X" and why?Muhammad Shahzad– Muhammad Shahzad2016-03-19 20:16:56 +00:00Commented Mar 19, 2016 at 20:16
- What about string.replace('',"X");Ramesh Rajendran– Ramesh Rajendran2018-01-30 10:27:17 +00:00Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 10:27
- its just for an example @MuhammadShahzad ;)Ali Mert Çakar– Ali Mert Çakar2021-04-27 12:55:08 +00:00Commented Apr 27, 2021 at 12:55
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10 Answers
You want \s
Matches a single white space character, including space, tab, form feed, line feed.
Equivalent to
[ \f\n\r\t\v\u00a0\u1680\u2000-\u200a\u2028\u2029\u202f\u205f\u3000\ufeff] in Firefox and [ \f\n\r\t\v] in IE.
str = str.replace(/\s/g, "X"); 
3 Comments
FishBasketGordo
+1 for remembering to show that the
replace function doesn't modify str, so you have to assign it back.
Cloudscape Germany
In a function, you can return str.replace, so you don't need to assign in that scope.
MS Berends
Remember for R to use
perl = TRUE, like gsub(pattern = "[\\s]+", ..., perl = TRUE)We can also use this if we want to change all multiple joined blank spaces with a single character:
str.replace(/\s+/g,'X'); See it in action here: https://regex101.com/r/d9d53G/1
Explanation
/
\s+/ g
\s+matches any whitespace character (equal to[\r\n\t\f\v ])+Quantifier — Matches between one and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy)
- Global pattern flags
- g modifier: global. All matches (don't return after first match)
1 Comment
John
The regex plus (+) is useful for my use case where I'm replacing whitespace type characters with an underscore (_) and if my users fat finger an extra space I really don't want to display an extra _. Thanks for this!
\s is a meta character that covers all white space. You don't need to make it case-insensitive — white space doesn't have case.
str.replace(/\s/g, "X") 
Comments
Have you tried the \s?
str.replace(/\s/g, "X"); 
answered Jun 28, 2011 at 13:19
Michael Berkowski
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Comments
If you use
str.replace(/\s/g, ""); it replaces all whitespaces. For example:
var str = "hello my world"; str.replace(/\s/g, "") //the result will be "hellomyworld" 
Comments
Try this:
str.replace(/\s/g, "X") 
1 Comment
Daniel Cassidy
That doesn’t work.
\s\n\t matches: any whitespace character, followed by a newline, followed by tab.Not /gi but /g
var fname = "My Family File.jpg" fname = fname.replace(/ /g,"_"); console.log(fname); gives
"My_Family_File.jpg" answered Jan 23, 2017 at 13:26
Dimitrios Ververidis
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Comments
You could use the function trim
let str = ' Hello World ';
alert (str.trim());
All the front and back spaces around Hello World would be removed.
1 Comment
Ali Mert Çakar
This would remove the whitespaces between "hello" and "world". Question says "all" whitespaces
Actually it has been worked but
just try this.
take the value /\s/g into a string variable like
String a = /\s/g; str = str.replaceAll(a,"X"); 
1 Comment
Ionel Lupu
where did you get
replaceAll from?I've used the "slugify" method from underscore.string and it worked like a charm:
https://github.com/epeli/underscore.string#slugifystring--string
The cool thing is that you can really just import this method, don't need to import the entire library.
