Collapse Whitespace function for Actionscript (See related posts)

This function will strip out all tabs and return characters. It will also collapse all runs of multiple spaces down to one. It will also remove a leading and trailing spaces. It is similar to the php_strip_whiespace() function in PHP.

function collapseWhiteSpace( theString ) {
        theString =  theString.split("\r").join("");
        theString =  theString.split("\t").join("");
        while ( theString.indexOf("  " ) != -1 ) {
                theString= theString.split("  ").join(" ");
        }
        if (theString.substr(0,1) == " ") {
                theString = theString.substr( 1 );
        }
        if (theString.substr( theString.length-1, 1 ) == " ") {
                theString = theString.substr( 0, theString.length - 1 );
        }
        return( theString );
}