I want to make sure at least 3 characters are entered into a search field.
For example I dont want this to go by where it has spaces in beginning and space between 2 characters: Is there a regular expression or someway to trim the spaces between the characters so I dont let less than 2 characters get submitted?

Here is one reg expression I tried but it let spaces between characters get entered so less than 3 characters were submitted.

/^\s+|\s+$/g,""

try this one
http://www.xploredotnet.blogspot.com...ing-using.html

Do it manually. Just loop through the input and remove that character which is equal to <space> from the string and then take first 3 character for the search input string.