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.

I would recommend you to use the literal notation, and using 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 of more white-space characters, for example 'trn' 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 worked 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)).

"foo is bar".replace(/ /g, '')

str.replace(/s/g,'')

Works for me.

jQuery.trim has the following hack for IE, although I'm not sure what versions it affects:

// Check if a string has a non-whitespace character in it

rnotwhite = /S/



// IE doesn't match non-breaking spaces with s

if ( rnotwhite.test( "xA0" ) ) {

    trimLeft = /^[sxA0]+/;

    trimRight = /[sxA0]+$/;

}

This works just as well: http://jsfiddle.net/maniator/ge59E/3/

var reg = new RegExp(" ","g"); //<< just look for a space.

In production

This is used in several apps to clean user-generated content removing extra spacing/returns etc but retains the meaning of spaces.

text.replace(/[nrst]+/g, ' ')

Remove all spaces in string

// Remove only spaces

`

Text with spaces 1 1     1     1 

and some

breaklines



`.replace(/ /g,'');

"

Textwithspaces1111

andsome

breaklines



"



// Remove spaces and breaklines

`

Text with spaces 1 1     1     1

and some

breaklines



`.replace(/s/g,'');

"Textwithspaces1111andsomebreaklines"