Remove zero-width space characters from a JavaScript string
Unicode has the following zero-width characters:
- U+200B zero width space
- U+200C zero width non-joiner Unicode code point
- U+200D zero width joiner Unicode code point
- U+FEFF zero width no-break space Unicode code point
To remove them from a string in JavaScript, you can use a simple regular expression:
var userInput = 'a\u200Bb\u200Cc\u200Dd\uFEFFe';
console.log(userInput.length); // 9
var result = userInput.replace(/[\u200B-\u200D\uFEFF]/g, '');
console.log(result.length); // 5
Note that there are many more symbols that may not be visible. Some of ASCII’s control characters, for example.
I had a problem some invisible characters were corrupting my JSON and causing Unexpected Token ILLEGAL exception which was crashing my site.
Here is my solution using RegExp variable:
var re = new RegExp("\u2028|\u2029");
var result = text.replace(re, '');
More about Javascript and zero width spaces you can find here: Zero Width Spaces