In this post, we will see how to detect any whitespace in a string.
To detect if a string has any space in it, we can use the regex test()
method or the String indexOf()
method in Javascript.
Let’s see some examples.
Using RegExp.test() to detect whitespace in a String
We can use the regex test()
method on a given string to detect if the given string contains any spaces in it.
The test()
method will return true
, if the expression is matched in the string otherwise it will return false
.
function checkSpaces(str){
return /s/.test(str)
}
console.log(checkSpace('Hello World')) // true
console.log(checkSpace('hello_world')) // false
In the above example, we have called the test
method on the regular expression /s/
.
The forward slash (/ /
) define the start and end of the regular expression.
And the regex character /s
matches any whitespace characters in a string like space and tab.
Read More RegExp.prototype.test() – JavaScript | MDN
Using indexOf() to check for whitespace in String
We can also use the String indexOf()
method to check for whitespace in a given string.
The indexOf
returns the position of the first occurrence of a given value in a string. If the value is not found it returns -1
.
Now here the value we will search in a given string is an empty space (' '
) with indexOf
method.
function detectSpaces(str){
if (str.indexOf(' ') !== -1){
return true;
}
return false
}
console.log(detectSpaces('Hello World')) //true
console.log(detectSpaces('hello_world')) //false
In this example, the function returns true
if the string contains any white space in it else it returns false
Conclusion: So to detect any white space in a given string in Javascript we can use the regex test()
method or the stringindexOf()
method.
Related Topics:
How to check if String contains only spaces in JavaScript
5 ways to convert string to number in JavaScript
Replace all occurrences of a string in JavaScript
Create multiline string in JavaScript | Split string to Multilines