26

If I have a string with multiple spaces between words:

Be an      excellent     person

using JavaScript/regex, how do I remove extraneous internal spaces so that it becomes:

Be an excellent person
KyleMit
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Jay Kunitz
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  • They all seem to work, so I voted them up. Note, I added leading and trailing whitespace to your test string. http://jsfiddle.net/karim79/YhG3h/2/ – karim79 Dec 17 '10 at 02:28
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    exact duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1981349/regex-to-replace-multiple-spaces-with-a-single-space – Recep Dec 29 '10 at 13:58
  • I hope you were placing your wife *up on* a pedestal – David Tedman-Jones Sep 16 '16 at 02:14
  • Possible duplicate of [Regex to replace multiple spaces with a single space](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1981349/regex-to-replace-multiple-spaces-with-a-single-space) – KyleMit Dec 01 '17 at 15:59

4 Answers4

37

You can use the regex /\s{2,}/g:

var s = "Be an      excellent     person"
s.replace(/\s{2,}/g, ' ');
KyleMit
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dheerosaur
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    Note: If you are attempting to remove multiple spaces from (for example) a tab separated file, this will sometimes remove the tabs. That is the only difference between this answer and Yi Jiang's answer. – AnnanFay Nov 22 '12 at 18:58
11

This regex should solve the problem: 

var t = 'Be an      excellent     person'; 
t.replace(/ {2,}/g, ' ');
// Output: "Be an excellent person"
KyleMit
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Yi Jiang
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9

Something like this should be able to do it. 

 var text = 'Be an      excellent     person';
 alert(text.replace(/\s\s+/g, ' '));
KyleMit
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RageZ
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3

you can remove double spaces with the following :

 var text = 'Be an      excellent     person';
 alert(text.replace(/\s\s+/g, ' '));

Snippet: 

 var text = 'Be an      excellent     person';
 //Split the string by spaces and convert into array
 text = text.split(" ");
 // Remove the empty elements from the array
 text = text.filter(function(item){return item;});
 // Join the array with delimeter space
 text = text.join(" ");
 // Final result testing
 alert(text);
Kevin
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Lokesh
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  • How is this different from accepted answer? Why your snippet completly different from code? – Toto Jun 07 '19 at 10:06