April 29, 2022
How to Trim Leading Spaces in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to trim leading spaces in javascript. Trimming leading spaces simply means removing any extra unwanted space at the beginning of the string. For a newbie developer, it can be a bit tricky to trim leading spaces in a string.
There are numerous ways to trim leading spaces in a string. But for the sake of simplicity, we will use trimStart()
method. The trimStart()
method removes any extra space at the beginning of a string.
In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will trim leading spaces in 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
, andh1
). Thediv
element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements. - The
innerText
for thebutton
element is“Trim”
and for theh1
element, it is“Result”
. - We have done some basic styling using CSS and added the link to our
style.css
stylesheet inside thehead
element. - We have also included our javascript file
script.js
with ascript
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>Trim</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 andh1
element using thedocument.querySelector()
method and stored them inbtnTrim
andoutput
variables respectively. - We have a global variable
myString
which holds a text as its value. - We are displaying
myString
in theh1
element usinginnerText
property. - We have attached a
click
event listener to thebutton
element. - In the event handler function, we are calling
trimStart()
method to trim leading spaces in the string. - This
trimStart()
method will return a new string and we are storing that string in theresult
variable. - We are displaying the
result
in theh1
element using theinnerText
property.
let btnTrim = document.querySelector("button"); let output = document.querySelector("h1"); let myString = ` Good to know, you were there`; output.innerText = myString; btnTrim.addEventListener("click", () => { let result = myString.trimStart(); output.innerText = result; });