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, and h1). The div element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements.
  • The innerText for the button element is “Trim” 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>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 and h1 element using the document.querySelector() method and stored them in btnTrim and output variables respectively.
  • We have a global variable myString which holds a text 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 trimStart() method to trim leading spaces in the string.
  • This trimStart() 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 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;
});