Question

I can’t use:

$('div:empty')

because the div might have empty spaces in it. I want to remove it if it has nothing or nothing but empty spaces.

Answer 1

This will return all div elements with no text apart from blank spaces (or other characters removed by .trim such as new line characters):

var emptyDivs = $("div").filter(function() {
    return $.trim($(this).text()) === "";
});

Update – based on comments

If any of the div elements in question have child elements which do not contain text (for example, img elements) then the above method will include them in the set of “empty” elements. To exclude them, you can use the following:

var emptyDivs = $("div").filter(function() {
    return $.trim($(this).text()) === "" && $(this).children().length === 0;
});