Vanilla JavaScript Replace All Whitespaces

— 2 minute read

Today we'll be looking into a widespread use case; we want to replace all whitespace occurrences from a string. Think about an input we want to save as a URL, and we need to replace the whitespaces with dashes. Or an image where we need to remove them.

JavaScript Replace All Whitespace

To remove all whitespaces, we have multiple options, but the best one is to use a regular expression.

Let's say we have the following string:

const string = "You've got a friend in me.";

And let's first start by just removing the whitespaces:

console.log(string.replace(/\s/g, ''));
// You'vegotafriendinme.

Now let's try and replace them all for dashes:

console.log(string.replace(/\s/g, '-'));
// You've-got-a-friend-in-me.

Awesome!

So how does this regular expression work?

\s means any whitespace character and g means it's a global modifier and must match any search occurrences!

You can have a play with this on Codepen.

See the Pen Vanilla JavaScript Replace All Whitespaces by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

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