Short tip: @Trim in JavaScript

by Johan Känngård / [JavaScript] / 2003-02-03 / #3

I will soon put together a longer article on how to extend the array object in JavaScript, so the @formula-lookalikes can be used as a "native" array function. While waiting, you may like this function, that removes all empty elements in a JavaScript array.

function trim(a){
	var tmp=new Array();
	for(j=0;j<a.length;j++)
		if(a[j]!='')
			tmp[tmp.length]=a[j];
	a.length=tmp.length;
	for(j=0;j<tmp.length;j++)
		a[j]=tmp[j];
	return a;
}

Can be used like this:

var a=new Array();
a[0]='Johan';
a[1]='';
a[2]='Hacker';
alert('Trimmed array is: '+trim(a));

If you just want to trim strings, you can use regular expressions (thanks Yaron Yogev!), like this:

" ab ".replace(/(^ +| +$)/, "")