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Javascript Regular Expression Remove Spaces

rlemon

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.

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Answer

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 'trn' 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)).