So i'm writing a tiny little plugin for JQuery to remove spaces from a string. see here
(function($) { $.stripSpaces = function(str) { var reg = new RegExp("[ ]+","g"); return str.replace(reg,""); } })(jQuery); my regular expression is currently [ ]+ to collect all spaces. This works.. however It doesn't leave a good taste in my mouth.. I also tried [\s]+ and [\W]+ but neither worked..
There has to be a better (more concise) way of searching for only spaces.
I would recommend you use the literal notation, and the \s character class:
//.. return str.replace(/\s/g, ''); //.. There's a difference between using the character class \s and just ' ', this will match a lot more white-space characters, for example '\t\r\n' etc.., looking for ' ' will replace only the ASCII 32 blank space.
The RegExp constructor is useful when you want to build a dynamic pattern, in this case you don't need it.
Moreover, as you said, "[\s]+" didn't work with the RegExp constructor, that's because you are passing a string, and you should "double escape" the back-slashes, otherwise they will be interpreted as character escapes inside the string (e.g.: "\s" === "s" (unknown escape)).
\s+ is faster, as it matches longer, thus might reduce the number of internal replace."foo is bar".replace(/ /g, '') In production and works across line breaks
This is used in several apps to clean user-generated content removing extra spacing/returns etc but retains the meaning of spaces.
text.replace(/[\n\r\s\t]+/g, ' ') This works just as well: http://jsfiddle.net/maniator/ge59E/3/
var reg = new RegExp(" ","g"); //<< just look for a space. 
str.replace(/\s/g,'') Works for me.
jQuery.trim has the following hack for IE, although I'm not sure what versions it affects:
// Check if a string has a non-whitespace character in it rnotwhite = /\S/ // IE doesn't match non-breaking spaces with \s if ( rnotwhite.test( "\xA0" ) ) { trimLeft = /^[\s\xA0]+/; trimRight = /[\s\xA0]+$/; } Remove all spaces in string
// Remove only spaces ` Text with spaces 1 1 1 1 and some breaklines `.replace(/ /g,''); " Textwithspaces1111 andsome breaklines " // Remove spaces and breaklines ` Text with spaces 1 1 1 1 and some breaklines `.replace(/\s/g,''); "Textwithspaces1111andsomebreaklines" Both of them should work:
text.replace(/ +/g,' ') Or:
text.replace(/ {2,}/g, ' ') const text = "eat healthy and drink gallon of water." text.replace(/ +/g,' ') // eat healthy and drink gallon of water. text.replace(/ {2,}/g, ' ') // eat healthy and drink gallon of water.