If you have a string with possible multiple spaces between words, and you want to convert the string to an array, use a split() method with the following regular expression : /\s*/  .

Example:

var str = "aa   bb    cc  dd";
var ar = str.split(/ \s*/);

 The resulting array will contain 4 elements : aa, bb, cc, dd.

A pattern to strip tags:

str.replace(/<\/?[^>]+>/gi, ‘’);

 Have not checked it yet. It is being used in the prototype library.