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javascript
Non-breaking white space Internet Explorer 8 JavaScript regexp bug (and how to fix it)
While developing jQuery plugin for upcoming bookmarking “Items in select boxes” plugin for our Vudu CMS
I wrote a simple regexp to strip few characters (pipe, minus, apostrof and white-space) that are added before the actual item.
function cleanOptionText(txt)
{
return txt.replace(/^[\s|'-]+/, '');
};
It worked just fine on FF9 and Chrome but in IE8 only the first pipe (|) was removed. After some debugging I discovered that I have both spaces and non-breaking spaces that should be removed and that in IE8 class shorthand \s (which should include all white space) doesn’t include non-breaking space.
Code for non-breaking space is 0xa0 (dec 160) so regexp should be updated as follows:
function cleanOptionText(txt)
{
return txt.replace(/^[\s\xA0|'-]+/, '');
};
Also we took opportunity to update our javascript trim functions:
String.prototype.trim = function()
{
return this.replace(/^[\s\xA0]+|[\s\xA0]+$/g,"");
}
String.prototype.ltrim = function()
{
return this.replace(/^[\s\xA0]+/g,"");
}
String.prototype.rtrim = function()
{
return this.replace(/[\s\xA0]+$/g,"");
}
Here is complete html test file:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>nbsp test</title>
</head>
<body>
<form action="#">
<fieldset>
<select id="testselect">
<option value="1"> Some option</option>
</select>
</fieldset>
</form>
<script type="text/javascript">
/*<![CDATA[*/
var txt=document.getElementById('testselect').options[0].text;
var analyizeTxt='';
var l=txt.length;
for(var i=0; i<l; i++)
{
analyizeTxt+= '[ ('+txt.charCodeAt(i)+')=('+txt.charAt(i)+')]';
}
alert(analyizeTxt);
var newTxt1 = txt.replace(/^\s+/, '');
alert('Using only \\s = ('+newTxt1+')');
var newTxt2 = txt.replace(/^[\s\xA0]+/, '');
alert('Using \\s and \\xA0= ('+newTxt2+')');
/*]]>*/
</script>
</body>
</html>
One thought on “Non-breaking white space Internet Explorer 8 JavaScript regexp bug (and how to fix it)”
March 12, 2014 at 17:32
Thank You!