Trim spaces from link beginning, and prepend space to outside of A tag

I have an author on our blog who mistakenly puts spaces inside the links all the time, so each link starts with an underlined space. This is very annoying. I've attempted to fix this via jquery with the following code, but can't seem to unlink the initial space AND add a non linked space above the HMTL A element.

    text = $(this).text();
    if (text[0] == ' ') {
        console.log(this);
        $(this).text($.trim( $(this).text() ));
        // theHTML = $(this).outerHTML();
        $(this).outerHTML().replaceWith('=' + $(this).outerHTML());
        // $(this).prepend('=');
    }

example: http://jsfiddle.net/691tx33w/

If we remove the space, the word and the link get smushed together.

Solution

used .trim() to remove spaces and .before() to add the space before the <a> tag

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('a').each(function() {        
        if ($(this).text().charAt(0) == ' ') {
            $(this).text($.trim($(this).text()));
            $(this).attr('href', $.trim($(this).attr('href')));
            $(this).before(' ');
        }
    });
});

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
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