Write extra spaces to html element with JavaScript

Question

We have JavaScript that writes to the document title and attempts to pad it with extra spaces...

document.title = "My Title&nbsp;&nbsp;"

But this gets translated to "My Title&nbsp;&nbsp;"

Anyone know how to prevent this?

I agree with SLaks, I see no reason why you should do this. If you just want to separate different elements of the title why not use document.title="My Title - My Subtitle"; etc. — irishbuzz
– irishbuzz, Commented Sep 20, 2010 at 15:03

Gumbo · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-20 13:25:38Z

8

  is an HTML entity reference that represents the character reference   (see list of entities in HTML 4) that again represents the Unicode character U+00A0. Now document.title is of the type DOMString that is similar to CDATA that’s value is not parsed. That means you cannot use HTML references for document.title as the value is not parsed as HTML.

Try Javascript’s Unicode escape sequences to denote these character like this:

document.title = "My Title\u00A0\u00A0"

answered Sep 20, 2010 at 13:17

Gumbo

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1 Comment

Thanks so much, not only for the answer but for the detailed explanation.

SLaks · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-20 13:16:30Z

1

The document.title property is a normal string that is not HTML-encoded.
You should set it to "My Title ".

However, the browser may strip the spaces itself; ~~there is nothing you can do about that~~.

answered Sep 20, 2010 at 13:16

SLaks

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Mark Swardstrom · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-19 20:02:32Z

0

You can do this

const titleElement = document.getElementsByTagName('title')[0]
titleElement.innerHTML = '&#160;'

But as pointed out, spaces of all types are stripped.

But, if you add ᠎ (the MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR 😁) to the end, it will not strip out the previous spaces.

titleElement.innerHTML = '&#6158;&#160;'

At least in Chrome.

answered Feb 19, 2020 at 20:02

Mark Swardstrom

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