CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
Faraz
Faraz

Reputation: 6285

regex to ignore special characters

Say, I have a text stored as:

var val1 = 'l-oreal';

I want to match val1 such that, it reads val1 and ignores hyphen (dash) in it. I want a regex that ignores special characters in a text. Is that possible?

I don't want to remove special character from the text. I want to ignore it.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 27528

Answers (3)

guijob
guijob

Reputation: 4488

You can either use ^ in order to select your special characters then replace it to an empty string '', as: 

val1.replace(/([^a-zA-z0-9]+)/g, s0 => ''); // loreal

All except a-zA-Z-0-9 will be removed.

Updated post for scenario when:

The string must contain characters abc and ignore any special characters

for this approach, you could make use of match to know if your string has any matches on your regex. If so, then you could use replace to switch special chars to empty string:

function strChecker(str) {
    var response;
    if(val1.match(/lorem/)) {
       response = val1.replace(/([^a-zA-z0-9]+)/g, s0 => '');
    }
    return response;
}

strChecker('ha-ha?lorem') // returns hahalorem
strChecker('ha-ha?loram') // return undefined

Upvotes: 5

Ahmad
Ahmad

Reputation: 12737

var val1 = 'l-oreal';
var val2 = val1.replace(/\W/g,'');  // remove any non-alphanumerics

console.log(val1);   // still the same, not changed
console.log(val2);   // only alphanumerics

Upvotes: 4

31piy
31piy

Reputation: 23869

You can match against the regex /[a-z]+/gi and then join by a space or any other character:

var testString = "any string l-orem";
var matcher = /[a-z]+/gi;
var matches = testString.match(matcher);
var result = matches.join('');
console.log(result);

This, of course, doesn't change your original string, and can be simply customized to your own needs.

Upvotes: 5

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