I'm trying to clean some html text with javascript, there are white spaces included before and after some words (text is poorly formatted). Currently I have this regex: $("#" + target + " *").replaceText(/([\S][\u05B0-\u05C4]*)/gi, '<span class="marked">$1<\/span>'); This will capture all the non white-space characters and wrap them in a span element, but will not capture spaces between words (I need the span). How would you solve this?