What is this "　" called?

Question

I am trying to parse a website, and I am trying to replace all occurrence of "　" in a string. This doesn't seem to be space or tab, what is this?

a more general question: how do you search for the name of some char you don't know? I tried ansi and utf-8 page with not result.

Also try to highlight that part, maybe there is symbol might show? — bumbumpaw, Jul 18 '14 at 03:37
@Niang Looks like a white space but doesn't quack like a white space — t3dodson, Jul 18 '14 at 03:43

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 18 '14 at 03:37

3

answered Jul 18 '14 at 03:37

user3822146

elixenide · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-18T03:50:04.617

3

It is character code 12288, a/k/a an ideographic space for use in, for example, many Asian languages. You can check this with this code:

alert( "　".charCodeAt(0) );

Edit: You can match this with the regex \s. For example, this converts all of those characters to a single, regular space (character 32):

"foo　bar　baz".replace(/\s/g, ' '); // produces foo bar baz

To replace this character but leave alone "normal" spaces (character 32, tab, new line, carriage return), you might try this:

"foo　bar　baz\tblah\tblah\nblah".replace(/(?![ \t\r\n])\s/g, ' ')

edited Jul 18 '14 at 03:50

answered Jul 18 '14 at 03:40

elixenide

1

Thanks for a way to replicate retrieving the character code. – t3dodson Jul 18 '14 at 03:41
Thanks, any advice on how to remove it from a string? `'　'.replace(/'　'/g, "")` doesn't seem to work – muyueh Jul 18 '14 at 03:48
2

@muyueh Rem0ve the qu0tes fr0m the regex. – Jul 18 '14 at 03:49
1

@muyueh See my edit. As Xero said, you don't need quotes in the regex. – elixenide Jul 18 '14 at 03:50

2 Answers2