Dom Purify to remove all non-breaking space

Question

I am using dompurify for a RichText component I have. I was hoping to add in a rule that would remove all &nbps; in the string. Here is some example code:

const content = '<p style="color:blue">Hello<span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>world</p>' 

const customSanitizer = {
   FORBID_ATTR: ['id', 'data-react-mount', 'data-react-props-id'],
   ALLOW_DATA_ATTR: false, 
}
 
const cleanedContent = DOMPurify.sanitize(content, customSanitizer)

The desired result is that the value of cleanedContent equals:

<p style="color:blue">Hello world</p> 

Is there anything I can add to customSanitizer to implement this?

Answer 1

According to the documentation, DOMPurify is meant to prevent XSS attacks by sanitizing input. Your desire to strip   does not quite fit into that category since   isn't going to cause a XSS problem, and so (while you could create a custom sanitizer with DOMPurify), you would be better off to just use the native String.prototype.replaceAll() method:

const content = document.querySelector("p");

content.innerHTML = content.innerHTML.replaceAll(" ","");

console.log(content.innerHTML);

<p style="color:blue">Hello<span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>world</p>