Javascript String replace white spaces before and after multiple selectors

Question

I have a string with multimple whitespaces between words and I want to reduce all the whitespace to just one.And after to delete the whitespace before and after[',','.','?','!'] and let one space after ','. Can you help me with a code?

Answer 1

Your approach does not work because you only escape the first space in your newSeparators, while . and ? remain special regex metacharacters, and /\ . / regex matches a space, any char, a space, and /\ ? / will match an optional space and 1 space after.

I suggest using:

/\s*([.!:?])\s*|\s*(,)\s*/g

See the regex demo.

Details:

• \s* - 0+ whitespaces
• ([.!:?]) - Group 1 capturing ., !, : or ?
• \s* - 0+ whitespaces
• | - or
• \s*(,)\s* - a , in between 0+ whitespaces captured into Group 2.

var newSeparators = /\s*([.!:?])\s*|\s*(,)\s*/g;
var data = "word, word . word ! word ? word";
data = data.replace(newSeparators, function($0, $1, $2) {
  return $2 ?  $2 + " " : " " + $1 + " ";
});
console.log(data);