How can I prepend 4 white spaces to an element and then remove them with javascript?

Question

When the user presses the tab key inside a content-editable div I prepend 4 whitespaces to the text inside that p tag like so:

  containerWithCaret = rangy.getSelection().anchorNode.parentNode
  $(containerWithCaret).prepend '    '

Since the div is set to white-space pre the tab shows up fine. But now when the user presses shift + tab I am not sure how to untab the white spaces? How can simulate the delete key being pressed 4 times? I tried using jquery to set the text of the div to a substring minus the first 4 character but got messy results with the caret.

Is there a good way to untab by keeping track of how many tabs each line has and to remove them how can I simulate the delete key being pressed 4 times?

Answer 1

Try this:

$( ".inner" ).prepend( "    " );

and for removing these spaces you can use:

myString.replace(/ +/g, '');

I think this will work.

happyCoding :D