How can I split a string into tokens in Javascript, including the white spaces?

Question

For example, the following string: " Hello Wor$LD !! " should be converted to :

["  ","Hello","  ","Wor$LD"," ","!!"," "]

I tried to split the string using \b , but it fails when there are non-word characters, such as $ and !.

Note that all white spaced should be grouped together.

at face value it looks like you just want to `string.split(' ')` or I guess maybe `string.split(/(\s+)/)` — CrayonViolent, May 24 '15 at 19:17
Thanks, but this does not give the expected result. The white spaces need to be preserved. — Yair, May 24 '15 at 19:20
@karthikmanchala Note the other question doesn't want to group whitespaces. But they are still almost duplicates, not sure if it should be closed. — Oriol, May 24 '15 at 19:38

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 24 '15 at 19:23

4

You can match the groups which either only contain whitespaces or don't contain any.

"  Hello  Wor$LD !! ".match(/\s+|\S+/g);

Note that if the string is empty, it will return null. If you want an empty array, add || [] at the end.

answered May 24 '15 at 19:23

Oriol

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24503827/split-string-into-array-without-deleting-delimiter – karthik manchala May 24 '15 at 19:29

1 Answers1