Update:
As @Ryan Leonard pointed out correctly, my answer doesn't really fix the point I made my self... You need to both trim and remove double spaces with (for example) string.replace(/ +/g, " ").. Or you could split the el.className and then remove empty values with (for example) arr.filter(Boolean).
const classes = element.className.split(' ').filter(Boolean);
or more modern
const classes = element.classList;
Old:
With all the given answers, you should never forget to user .trim() (or $.trim())
Because classes gets added and removed, it can happen that there are multiple spaces between class string.. e.g. 'class1 class2 class3'..
This would turn into ['class1', 'class2','','','', 'class3']..
When you use trim, all multiple spaces get removed..