How to include whitespaces in string replace?

Question

I need to replace strings like '5 hours' with '5h'. But I'm only able to get it to '5 h'. How to remove the space in between? When I replace the "hours" in my function to " hours" with a whitespace, it replaces nothing and returns '5 hours'.

$('div.block_name span').text(function(){
    return $(this).text().replace("hours","h");
});

Answer 1

You can use regex like so:

 // "\\s?" means that find a space only if it exists console.log("5 hours".replace(/\\s?hours/, 'h')); // 5h console.log("5hours".replace(/\\s?hours/, 'h')); // 5h 

Answer 2

Try this:

$('div.block_name span').text(function(){
                    return $(this).text().replace(" hours","h");
                });

This will replace the leading whitespace as well as the string hours with the string h .

Working JSFiddle Example: https://jsfiddle.net/4bqz79vh/