Question

I have the following little whitespace clean up function and while it works perfectly when losing focus by tabbing to the next tabindex, if I simply lose focus by clicking off the element that is currently receiving focus and re-examine the clean up is done EXCEPT for the [ \t]+$ at the end of the “string”

function cleanUpYourAct(){
$(':text').each(function(index){    
var messy = $(this).val();
var clean = messy.replace(/\s+/g," ");
var trimmed = clean.replace(/^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$/,"");
$(this).val(trimmed);   
});
}

$(':text').blur(cleanUpYourAct);

Any ideas? Maybe regex set I bunched together is garbage?

Thank you

Answer 1

You’re not doing a global replace on the second regex, so if there is whitespace at the beginning you’re not also replacing whitespace at the end:

var trimmed = clean.replace(/^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$/g,"");

EDIT:

You might also think about performing this action on just the element that is the event target.

Something like:

function cleanUpYourAct () {
  var messy = $(this).val()
    , clean = messy.replace(/\s+/g, " ")
    , trimmed = clean.replace(/^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$/g, "")
  $(this).val(trimmed)
}