How to Remove First and Last Whitespace from String in Javascript

In this tutorial, you will learn how to remove first and last whitespace from string in javascript. There is always a chance that the string will begin or end with an extra unwanted space. In these conditions, reading is challenging and distracting. For a newbie developer, it can be a bit tricky to remove first and last whitespace from a string.

There are numerous ways to remove first and last whitespace from a string. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use trim() method. The trim() method removes any extra space at the beginning and at the end of a string.

In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will remove first and last whitespace from the string 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 “Remove” 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>Remove</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 btnRemove and output variables respectively.
  • We have a global variable myString which holds a string as its value.
  • We are displaying myString in the h1 element using innerText property.
  • We have attached a click event listener to the button element.
  • In the event handler function, we are calling trim() method to remove any extra whitespace at the start as well as at the end of the string.
  • This trim() method will return a new string and we are storing that string in the result variable.
  • We are displaying the result in the h1 element using the innerText property.
let btnRemove = document.querySelector("button");
let output = document.querySelector("h1");

let myString = ` We had rain last night   `;
output.innerText =  myString;
 
btnRemove.addEventListener("click", () => {  
  let result = myString.trim();
  output.innerText = result;
});