I typically use the following code in JavaScript to split a string by whitespace.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog..split(/s+/);

// [The, quick, brown, fox, jumps, over, the, lazy, dog.]

This of course works even when there are multiple whitespace characters between words.

The  quick brown fox     jumps over the lazy   dog..split(/s+/);

// [The, quick, brown, fox, jumps, over, the, lazy, dog.]

The problem is when I have a string that has leading or trailing whitespace in which case the resulting array of strings will include an empty character at the beginning and/or end of the array.

  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. .split(/s+/);

// [, The, quick, brown, fox, jumps, over, the, lazy, dog., ]

It's a trivial task to eliminate such empty characters, but I'd rather take care of this within the regular expression if that's at all possible. Does anybody know what regular expression I could use to accomplish this goal?