Javascript regex: remove space(s) if not surrounded by a letter

Question

I'm trying to clean some html text with javascript, there are white spaces included before and after some words (text is poorly formatted).

Currently I have this regex:

$("#" + target + " *").replaceText(/([\S][\u05B0-\u05C4]*)/gi, '<span class="marked">$1<\/span>');

This will capture all the non white-space characters and wrap them in a span element, but will not capture spaces between words (I need the span).

How would you solve this?

Answer 1

This will match multiple repeated (spaces) and replace them with a single space:

'Quick   Brown      Fox'.replace(/[ ]+/g, ' '); //returns 'Quick Brown Fox'

This will match multiple repeated \\n\\r\\t (whitespace symbols - spaces, tabs, new-lines and line-breaks) and replace them with a single space:

'Quick     Brown    Fox'.replace(/\s+/g, ' ');  //returns 'Quick Brown Fox'

Fiddled

I don't understand your explanation of what you're trying to achieve with span wraparounds, but you can do whatever you want with the output from above.