RegEx: How to remove extra white spaces / line bre

Question

I want to "strip" all (somewhat) unnecessary whitespaces from the HTML markup.

Obj:

Render:

For a nodeValue like that, this solution works perfectly well.

However, when having a non-breaking-space   the browsers renders - as we know - differently.

Obj:

Render:

I want to "strip" the string just like the DOM renderer does.

What is the RegEx that does the Job? Are there other pitfalls where I might cut something that is actually "needed" rendering?

NOTE: I'm operating on innerHTML, so the client can't help me...

Answer 1

This replaces all two-or-more whitespaces with a single space:

myStr = myStr.replace(/\s{2,}/g,' ');

However, this will break anywhere you have a <pre> tag, or more generally anywhere that CSS white-space:pre is applied. To be valid, you'd need to getComputedStyle() on the elements in question and then only apply this transformation to the text nodes where the whitespace is not significant.

Answer 2

Replacing /\s\s+/ with " " would do the trick.