Question

I’ve got a textfield with a bunch of punctuation which is always surrounded by spaces. So that for instance:

I don't recall saying ' pick up the boot ' or ' now is the time ' . But it's possible , so I may have . 

What is the regular expression syntax to get rid of these spaces? I’m working in actionscript.

Edit: it’s actually both leading and trailing, as you can see from the above example.

Answer 1

Try this:

var str:String = "I don't recall saying ' pick up the boot ' or ' now is the time ' . But it's possible , so I may have .";

// "foo ' bar ' baz" => "foo 'bar' baz"
var re1:RegExp = /'\s(.*?)\s'/g;
str = str.replace(re1, "'$1'");

// "foo , bar . baz" => "foo, bar. baz"
var re2:RegExp = /\s([.,])/g;
str = str.replace(re2, "$1");

For this particular string you’ll get that result:

I don't recall saying 'pick up the boot' or 'now is the time'. But it's possible, so I may have.

May be the first regexp need some adjustments as it won’t work for string like

I didn ' t say ' foo '.

as it’ll be converted to

I didn 't say' foo '.

Short explanation for special symbols used in first regexp:

• \s is for space character (space, tab)
• . means any character
• * zero or more repetition
• ? makes * quantifier non-greedy, so it’ll match as less characters as possible
• wrapping it all in parenthesis creates a capturing group; we can later refer its content in replacement string as $1

You can find more information about regexps on this site or in this section of docs from Adobe.