I was trying to debug a problem of searching inside a string and it came down to the following interesting piece of code.
Both "item " and "item " seem equal but they are not!
var result = ("item " === "item ");
document.write(result);
console.log(result);After investigating this further by pasting it on a Python interpreter, I found out that the first "item " has a different kind of space as "item\xc2\xa0". Which I think is a non breaking space.
Now, A possible solution to match these strings will be to replace \xc2\xa0 with space, but is there a better approach to convert all special space characters with normal space?.
The space in the first string is character code 160 (a non-breaking space), and the space in the second string is character code 32 (a normal space), so the strings aren't equal to each other.
console.log("item ".charCodeAt(4), "item ".charCodeAt(4));is there a better approach to convert all special space characters with normal space?.
You can match space characters which aren't tabs or newlines and replace with a normal space:
const makeSpacesNormal = str => str.replace(/(?=\s)[^\r\n\t]/g, ' ');
console.log(makeSpacesNormal("item ") === makeSpacesNormal("item "));Specifically, the \s will match a whole bunch of space-like characters:
[\t\n\v\f\r \u00a0\u2000\u2001\u2002\u2003\u2004\u2005\u2006\u2007\u2008\u2009\u200a\u200b\u2028\u2029\u3000]
and by matching and replacing those (except newlines and tabs, if you want), you'll be left with ordinary spaces.