How to Remove White Space from Start or End of a String in JavaScript

When you're working with strings, you usually don't want to have whitespace at the start or the end of a string.

This can happen when you're working with strings that you don't control and can therefore have characters you don't want.

In this post, we'll learn how to remove whitespace at the start and end of a string in JavaScript.

Using the trim() method

The easiest way to trim whitespace from the start and end of a string is to use the trim() method. This method is called directly on the string variable and returns the string with the whitespace removed.

JAVASCRIPT
const string = "   Hello World!   ";

const stripped = string.trim();

console.log(stripped);

BASH
Hello World!

Using the trimStart() method

When you're only interested in removing the whitespace from the beginning of the string, use the trimStart() method. It functions exactly like the trim method except

JAVASCRIPT
const string = "   Hello World!   ";

const stripped = string.trimStart();

console.log(stripped);

BASH
Hello World!

Using the trimEnd() method

Alternatively, when you only want to remove whitespace from the end of the string, use the trimEnd() method. It's the opposite of the trimStart() method.

JAVASCRIPT
const string = "   Hello World!   ";

const stripped = string.trimEnd();

console.log(stripped);

BASH
Hello World!

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to use the three different methods for removing whitespace from a string.

Your options are to remove them from both the start and end, just the start, or just the end.

Hopefully, this post has been useful to you. Thanks for reading!

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