how do I strip white space when grabbing text with jQuery?

Question

I'm wanting to use jQuery to wrap a mailto: anchor around an email address, but it's also grabbing the whitepace that the CMS is generating.

Here's the HTML I have to work with, the script as I have it and a copy of the output.

HTML

<div class="field field-type-text field-field-email">
  <div class="field-item">
    [email protected]    </div>
</div>

jQuery JavaScript

$(document).ready(function(){
  $('div.field-field-email .field-item').each(function(){
    var emailAdd = $(this).text();
      $(this).wrapInner('<a href="mailto:' + emailAdd + '"></a>');
   });
 });

Generated HTML

<div class="field field-type-text field-field-email">
  <div class="field-items"><a href="mailto:%0A%20%20%20%[email protected]%20%20%20%20">
    [email protected]    </a></div>
</div>

Though I suspect that others reading this question might want to just strip the leading and tailing whitespace, I'm quite happy to lose all the whitespace considering it's an email address I'm wrapping.

Answer 1

Use the replace function in js:

var emailAdd = $(this).text().replace(/ /g,'');

That will remove all the spaces

If you want to remove the leading and trailing whitespace only, use the jQuery $.trim method :

var emailAdd = $.trim($(this).text());

Answer 2

Javascript has built in trim:

str.trim()

It doesn't work in IE8. If you have to support older browsers, use Tuxmentat's or Paul's answer.

Answer 3

Actually, jQuery has a built in trim function:

 var emailAdd = jQuery.trim($(this).text());

See here for details.

Answer 4

str=str.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,'');