JS - conversion of non breakable space

Question

I'm reading out a text from an HTML element and saving it in an JS array, but if the user puts in more then one empty space it is converted into a non breakable space symbol. Later on if I read out the array it prints out "&nbsp" instead of an empty space. How can I detect an empty space?

&nbsp  //instead of an empty space

I tried replace, but it does not work:

myText.replace(/(&nbsp;)*/g," ")

It's unclear what you're asking. In HTML multiple consecutive spaces are rendered as a single space so if you want multiple spaces to actually show, then ` ` is used. — jfriend00, Apr 28 '13 at 16:16
The user has got an empty text box, if he submits empty spaces, these are converted to &nbsp — daisy, Apr 28 '13 at 16:19
@daisy It's odd that they are automatically converted to ` `. Maybe some library is doing it? — ulentini, Apr 28 '13 at 16:22
@Uby I tried replace, but it does not work: myText.replace(/( )*/g," ") — daisy, Apr 28 '13 at 16:33
`g` modifier perform a global match (ie: it doesn't stop after first match), so it's useful when you need to replace all occurrences of a string — ulentini, Apr 28 '13 at 16:49
@Uby in order to convert it back I then tried myText.replace(/' '/g, ' ') but here it only works one time, how can I get all ' ' ? — daisy, Apr 28 '13 at 16:57

Notepad · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-28T18:17:35.457

4

Regex notation table for whitespace

\x20 – standard space ‘\s’
\xC2\xA0 – ‘&nbsp;’
\x0D -  ‘\r’
\x0A – new Line or ‘\n’
\x09 – tab or ‘\t’

JS table notation :

String.fromCharCode(160) - &nbsp;

Now use it for replacing all your characters, add more if you want to remove newline or carriage return

var re = '/(\xC2\xA0/|&nbsp;)';
x = x.replace(re, ' ');

you can also use

var re = '/(\xC2\xA0/|&nbsp;)';
x = x.replace(re, String.fromCharCode(160));

Try this tool to test more Regular expression www.rubular.com

edited Apr 28 '13 at 18:17

answered Apr 28 '13 at 18:11

Notepad

1,659
1
12
14

1

You can also use $(selector).html() to fetch data along with all space if you are using jquery. – Notepad Apr 28 '13 at 18:11
`var tmp = document.createElement('div'); tmp.innerHTML = ' '; var nonBreakableSpaceChar = tmp.innerText;` – jave.web Mar 17 '21 at 16:50

JS - conversion of non breakable space

1 Answers1

Linked