This apparently is not working:
X = $td.text();
if (X == ' ') {
X = '';
}
Is there something about a non-breaking space or the ampersand that JavaScript doesn't like?
is a HTML entity. When doing .text(), all HTML entities are decoded to their character values.
Instead of comparing using the entity, compare using the actual raw character:
var x = td.text();
if (x == '\xa0') { // Non-breakable space is char 0xa0 (160 dec)
x = '';
}
Or you can also create the character from the character code manually it in its Javascript escaped form:
var x = td.text();
if (x == String.fromCharCode(160)) { // Non-breakable space is char 160
x = '';
}
More information about String.fromCharCode is available here:
More information about character codes for different charsets are available here:
Remember that .text() strips out markup, thus I don't believe you're going to find in a non-markup result.
Made in to an answer....
var p = $('<p>').html(' ');
if (p.text() == String.fromCharCode(160) && p.text() == '\xA0')
alert('Character 160');
Shows an alert, as the ASCII equivalent of the markup is returned instead.
That entity is converted to the char it represents when the browser renders the page. JS (jQuery) reads the rendered page, thus it will not encounter such a text sequence. The only way it could encounter such a thing is if you're double encoding entities.