CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
Industrial
Industrial

Reputation: 42758

Splitting string by whitespace, without empty elements?

I am trying to explode an string using javascript to pick searchterms, whitespace-separated. However I get empty array elements if a searchterm is ended by a whitespace, as shown below.

What should I do instead to avoid post-processing this array and removing empty elements?

var str = "searchterm1 searchterm2";
console.log(str.split(" ")); // ["searchterm1", "searchterm2"]

var strb = "searchterm1 "; // Note the ending whitespace
console.log(strb.split(" ")); // ["searchterm1", ""]

Upvotes: 69

Views: 60510

Answers (6)

Yangshun Tay
Yangshun Tay

Reputation: 53159

This is the simplest solution IMO. trim() first to get rid of leading/trailing whitespace, then split by whitespace.

function split(str) {
  return str.trim().split(/\s+/);
}

console.log(split('foo bar baz'));
console.log(split('  foo  bar  baz '));

Upvotes: 3

Orel Eraki
Orel Eraki

Reputation: 12196

This is a bit old, but for documentation purposes there is also another neat way.

someString.filter(Boolean);

// Example
['fds', '', 'aaaaa', 'AA', 'ffDs', "", 'd'].filter(Boolean);
// Output
["fds", "aaaaa", "AA", "ffDs", "d"]

Edit

How does it work ?

The following are identical

.filter(Boolean)
.filter((value) => Boolean(value))

Boolean() as function behave as a converter of any type to Boolean by the standard input to output.

References:
Global Objects -> Boolean
Truthy
Falsy

Upvotes: 26

Chris Sprague
Chris Sprague

Reputation: 3574

If you want a function that you can use, just extend String:

 String.prototype.splitNoSpaces = function(){
     return this.split(' ').filter(function(i){return i});
 };

 //Now use it!
 var classString = "class1    class2 class3    class4";
 var classArray = classString.splitNoSpaces();

 //classArray[0] is class1
 //classArray[1] is class2
 //classArray[2] is class3
 //classArray[3] is class4

Thanks to @user1079877 for the hint

Upvotes: 1

user1079877
user1079877

Reputation: 9368

No matter what splitter this always works:

str.split(' ').filter(function(i){return i})
// With ES6
str.split(' ').filter(i => i)

Filter logic also can change in some other cases.

Upvotes: 72

Stig Hausberg
Stig Hausberg

Reputation: 836

Add function:

//Some browsers support trim so we check for that first
if(!String.prototype.trim) {  
  String.prototype.trim = function () {  
    return this.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,'');  
  };  
}

Then call trim on the string:

var strb = "searchterm1 "; // Note the ending whitespace
console.log(strb.trim().split(" ")); // ["searchterm1"]

Upvotes: 0

Gumbo
Gumbo

Reputation: 655239

You could simply match all non-space character sequences:

str.match(/[^ ]+/g)

Upvotes: 81

Related Questions