Question

So i’m writing a tiny little plugin for JQuery to remove spaces from a string. see here

(function($) {
    $.stripSpaces = function(str) {
        var reg = new RegExp("[ ]+","g");
        return str.replace(reg,"");
    }
})(jQuery);

my regular expression is currently [ ]+ to collect all spaces.
This works.. however It doesn’t leave a good taste in my mouth..
I also tried [\s]+ and [\W]+ but neither worked..

There has to be a better (more concise) way of searching for only spaces.

Answer 1

I would recommend you use the literal notation, and the \s character class:

//..
return str.replace(/\s/g, '');
//..

There’s a difference between using the character class \s and just ' ', this will match a lot more white-space characters, for example '\t\r\n' etc.., looking for ' ' will replace only the ASCII 32 blank space.

The RegExp constructor is useful when you want to build a dynamic pattern, in this case you don’t need it.

Moreover, as you said, "[\s]+" didn’t work with the RegExp constructor, that’s because you are passing a string, and you should “double escape” the back-slashes, otherwise they will be interpreted as character escapes inside the string (e.g.: "\s" === "s" (unknown escape)).