How to remove spaces from a string using JavaScript?

How to remove spaces in a string? For instance:

Input:

'/var/www/site/Brand new document.docx'

Output:

'/var/www/site/Brandnewdocument.docx'

This?

str = str.replace(/\s/g, '');

Example

var str = '/var/www/site/Brand new document.docx';

document.write( str.replace(/\s/g, '') );

Update: Based on this question, this:

str = str.replace(/\s+/g, '');

is a better solution. It produces the same result, but it does it faster.

The Regex

\s is the regex for "whitespace", and g is the "global" flag, meaning match ALL \s (whitespaces).

A great explanation for + can be found here.

As a side note, you could replace the content between the single quotes to anything you want, so you can replace whitespace with any other string.


var a = b = " /var/www/site/Brand new   document.docx ";

console.log( a.split(' ').join('') );
console.log( b.replace( /\s/g, '') ); 

Two ways of doing this!


SHORTEST and FASTEST: str.replace(/ /g, '');


Benchmark:

Here my results - (2018.07.13) MacOs High Sierra 10.13.3 on Chrome 67.0.3396 (64-bit), Safari 11.0.3 (13604.5.6), Firefox 59.0.2 (64-bit) ):

SHORT strings

Short string similar to examples from OP question

enter image description here

The fastest solution on all browsers is / /g (regexp1a) - Chrome 17.7M (operation/sec), Safari 10.1M, Firefox 8.8M. The slowest for all browsers was split-join solution. Change to \s or add + or i to regexp slows down processing.

LONG strings

For string about ~3 milion character results are:

  • regexp1a: Safari 50.14 ops/sec, Firefox 18.57, Chrome 8.95
  • regexp2b: Safari 38.39, Firefox 19.45, Chrome 9.26
  • split-join: Firefox 26.41, Safari 23.10, Chrome 7.98,

You can run it on your machine: https://jsperf.com/remove-string-spaces/1


Following @rsplak answer: actually, using split/join way is faster than using regexp. See the performance test case

So

var result = text.split(' ').join('')

operates faster than

var result = text.replace(/\s+/g, '')

On small texts this is not relevant, but for cases when time is important, e.g. in text analisers, especially when interacting with users, that is important.


On the other hand, \s+ handles wider variety of space characters. Among with \n and \t, it also matches \u00a0 character, and that is what   is turned in, when getting text using textDomNode.nodeValue.

So I think that conclusion in here can be made as follows: if you only need to replace spaces ' ', use split/join. If there can be different symbols of symbol class - use replace(/\s+/g, '')