How is a non-breaking space represented in a JavaScript string?

  is a HTML entity. When doing .text(), all HTML entities are decoded to their character values.

Instead of comparing using the entity, compare using the actual raw character:

var x = td.text();
if (x == '\xa0') { // Non-breakable space is char 0xa0 (160 dec)
  x = '';
}

Or you can also create the character from the character code manually it in its Javascript escaped form:

var x = td.text();
if (x == String.fromCharCode(160)) { // Non-breakable space is char 160
  x = '';
}

More information about String.fromCharCode is available here:

fromCharCode – MDC Doc Center

More information about character codes for different charsets are available here:

Windows-1252 Charset
UTF-8 Charset