How to remove characters in a string that matches a RegEx while preserving spaces?-CodePudding

I am trying to remove characters from a string so that it will match this RegEx: ^[-a-zA-Z0-9._:,] $. For example:

const input = "test // hello". The expected output would be "test hello". I tried the following:

input.replace(/^[-a-zA-Z0-9._:,] $/g, "")

But this does not seem to work

CodePudding user response：

The example output "hello world" that you give does not match your regex, because the regex does not allow spaces. Assuming you want to keep spaces, use

input.replace(/[^-a-zA-Z0-9._:, ]/g, "")

The negation character ^ must be inside the [...]. The is not needed, because /g already ensures that all matching characters are replaced (that is, removed).

If you also want to condense consecutive spaces into a single space (as implied by your example), use

input.replace(/[^-a-zA-Z0-9._:, ]/g, "").replace(/\s /g, " ")

CodePudding user response：

I like to use the following canonical approach:

var input = "test // hello";
var output = input.replace(/\s*[^-a-zA-Z0-9._:, ] \s*/g, " ").trim()
console.log(output);

The logic here is to target all unwanted characters and their surrounding whitespace. We replace with just a single space. Then we do a trim at the end in case there might be an extra leading/trailing space.