June 6, 2022

How to Remove Leading and Trailing Spaces in Javascript

By Krishnaa JavaScript Questions 0 Comments

In this tutorial, you will learn how to remove leading and trailing spaces in javascript. It is very unusual to get an extra space at the beginning and at the end of a sentence. For a newbie developer, it can be a bit tricky to remove leading and trailing spaces.

There are numerous ways to remove leading and trailing spaces. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use trim() method. The trim() method removes any extra space at the beginning and at the end of a string.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will remove leading and trailing spaces and display the result on the screen. Please have a look over the code example and the steps given below.

HTML & CSS

We have 3 elements in the HTML file (div, button, and h1). The div element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements.
The innerText for the button element is “Trim” and for the h1 element, it is “Result”.
We have done some basic styling using CSS and added the link to our style.css stylesheet inside the head element.
We have also included our javascript file script.js with a script tag at the bottom.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
  <title>Document</title>
</head>

<body>

  <div class="container">    
    <button>Trim</button>
    <h1>Result</h1>
  </div>

  <script src="script.js"></script>
</body>

</html>

.container {        
    text-align: center;
}

button {
  margin-top: 10px;
  padding: 10px 20px;
}

Javascript

We have selected the button element and h1 element using the document.querySelector() method and stored them in btnTrim and output variables respectively.
We have a global variable myString which holds a string as its value.
We are displaying myString in the h1 element using innerText property.
We have attached a click event listener to the button element.
In the event handler function, we are calling trim() method to remove any extra space at the beginning as well as at the end of the string.
This trim() method will return a new string and we are storing that string in the result variable.
We are displaying the result in the h1 element using the innerText property.

let btnTrim = document.querySelector("button");
let output = document.querySelector("h1");

let myString = ` Dancing with stars   `;
output.innerText =  myString;
 
btnTrim.addEventListener("click", () => {  
  let result = myString.trim();
  output.innerText = result;
});

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