Javascript: trim leading and trailing spaces

• March 29th, 2007
• Posted by Stewart
• Permalink
• 5 Comment(s)

Here’s a quick function to remove leading, trailing and multiple spaces from a string using regular expression which is much faster that using loops!

// remove multiple, leading or trailing spaces
function trim(s) {
	s = s.replace(/(^\s*)|(\s*$)/gi,"");
	s = s.replace(/[ ]{2,}/gi," ");
	s = s.replace(/\n /,"\n");
	return s;
}

To use it, do something like this:-

alert(trim("      My     name is         stewart                  "));

It will strip the spaces at the start, end and also any multiple spaces in the middle to give a nicely formatted string! Simple, eh?

Download the complete Javascript remove leading and trailing spaces now!