CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Gerald Ferreira
Gerald Ferreira

Reputation: 1337

Regex to remove apostrophe

I have input text that contains a ' like in this text "Frank's Reel Movie Reviews"

how do I get rid of the '

I have tried

.replace (/\'/ig, '');
.replace ('\'', '');

But it seem like the ' does now want to be deleted...

I am thinking that the ' maybe encoded utf-8 or something

Any ideas

Upvotes: 3

Views: 28207

Answers (7)

Boris
Boris

Reputation: 1143

If you want something very selective to remove (or replace by anything like a space) apostrophes but not the symbol ' for feet imperial unit, use:

val apostropheRegex = """(?<=[a-zA-Z])'(?=[a-zA-Z])"""
"john's carpet is 5' x 8'".replaceAll(apostropheRegex, "XXX") // johnXXXs carpet is 5' x 8'

It means "Replace all symbol ' that are between two letters".

Upvotes: 0

TheTechGuy
TheTechGuy

Reputation: 17354

This is late reply but summarizing the answer with quality answer with code addressing different ways of doing it.

You do not need to use escape sequence when detecting apostrophe. The correct regular expression would be

/'+/g

This will remove all apostrophes from the regular expression, if if there are occurrences like ' or '', or ''' and so on.

Here is the code snippet which removes only one instance of apostrophe from a string.

JavasScript

var name = document.getElementById('name').value;
name = name.replace(/'/,'')
alert('The result string ' + name);

PHP 

$subject ="Mik's sub";
$resplace = "";
$search ="'";
$new_str =  str_replace($search, $replace, $subject);
echo "New Subject : $new_str";

Unicode with JavaScript

var regex = /\u0027/;
name = name.replace(regex,'')

Upvotes: 6

Allen
Allen

Reputation:

Apostrophe is not a meta character.you should not escape it.

Upvotes: 0

Amber
Amber

Reputation: 526583

If you just want to have letters and spaces in your result, you could always match any character that isn't one of those, such as...

.replace (/[^a-zA-Z ]+/ig, '');

You could of course also add any other characters you desired to permit to the regex.

Upvotes: 0

Cameron
Cameron

Reputation: 98746

The ' should not need to be escaped. Try leaving it naked, without the backslash.

Upvotes: 1

Peter Boughton
Peter Boughton

Reputation: 112150

The regex [^\w ] will match anything that is not alphanumeric or space.

You could use this to ensure all apostrophes/quotes/etc get removed, even if done with Unicode - though there is not enough information in the question to know if this is acceptable.

Upvotes: 6

brabster
brabster

Reputation: 43560

Assuming you're working with Java, have you tried .replaceAll("'", "")? Works for me.

Upvotes: 2

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