JavaScript Trim Function

I know my audience doesn’t care much for Web Development content, but this was a fascinating article about the various methods of trimming the white space from a text string.

See, most scripting languages have some kind of “trim()” function that you pass a string into. It removes extra spaces and return characters and line-feed characters and tabs and so forth. However, JavaScript doesn’t have one of these functions. In my research to determine the best method for constructing one, I ran across the aforementioned article. In it, Steve Levithan describes which browsers implemented which technique better, and why.

THE WINNER?

A function called trim11.

function trim11 (str) {
	str = str.replace(/^\\s+/, '');
	for (var i = str.length - 1; i > 0; i--) {
		if (/\\S/.test(str.charAt(i))) {
			str = str.substring(0, i + 1);
			break;
		}
	}
	return str;
}