How to Check if String has Only Whitespace in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to check if string has only whitespace in javascript. A space in an English sentence represents a gap between 2 words which is extremely important to have for readability purposes.  Without a space, a combination of two or more words will not hold any specific meaning. For a beginner, it can be a bit tricky to find if the string has only whitespace.

There are numerous ways to check if a string has only whitespace. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use the regular expression and ternary operator (?) to accomplish our goal. The test() method of RegExpObject is used to perform a pattern search in a string and returns a Boolean value.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will check if the string has only whitespace and display the result on the screen.  Please have a look over the code example and the steps given below.

HTML & CSS

  • We have 3 elements in the HTML file (div, button, and h1). The div element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements.
  • The innerText for the button element is “Check” and for the h1 element, it is “Result”.
  • We have done some basic styling using CSS and added the link to our style.css stylesheet inside the head element.
  • We have also included our javascript file script.js with a script tag at the bottom.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
  <title>Document</title>
</head>

<body>

  <div class="container">    
    <button>Check</button>
    <h1>Result</h1>
  </div>

  <script src="script.js"></script>
</body>

</html>
.container {        
    text-align: center;
}

button {
  margin-top: 10px;
  padding: 10px 20px;
}

Javascript

  • We have selected the button element and h1 element using the document.querySelector() method and stored them in btnCheck and output variables respectively.
  • We have attached a click event listener to the button element.
  • We have a global variable myString which holds a string as its value.
  • We have the regExp variable which holds a regular expression /^\s*$/g as its value.
  • In the event handler function, we are calling the test() method of regExp and passing myString as a parameter. It will return a Boolean value which we are storing in the isMatch variable.
  • We are using the ternary operator (?) and checking whether isMatch is true or false. It will be true if the string has only whitespace.
  • Depending upon the result of the check, we will assign “Yes” or “No” to the result variable.
  • We are displaying the result in the h1 element using the innerText property.
let btnCheck = document.querySelector("button");
let output = document.querySelector("h1");

let myString = "         ";
let regExp = /^\s*$/g;


btnCheck.addEventListener("click", () => {

  let isMatch = regExp.test(myString)
  let result = isMatch ? "Yes" : "No";
  output.innerText = result;
  
});