splitting by white space or multiple white spaces

Question

Right now I split words by one whitespace and store in an array: var keywds = $("#searchquery").text().split(" ");

The problem is there can/might be multiple white spaces. For example :

"hello      world"

How would I still have the array = [hello, world]

Answer 1

Use a regular expression (\s matches spaces, tabs, new lines, etc.)

$("#searchquery").text().split(/\s+/);

or if you want to split on spaces only:

 $("#searchquery").text().split(/ +/);

+ means match one or more of the preceding symbol.

Further reading:

• MDN - string.split
• MDN - Regular expressions
• http://www.regular-expressions.info/