[javascript] Remove special symbols and extra spaces and replace with underscore using the replace method

I want to remove all special characters and spaces from a string and replace with an underscore. The string is

    var str = "hello world & hello universe";

I have this now which replaces only spaces:

      str.replace(/\s/g, "_");

The result I get is hello_world_&_hello_universe, but I would like to remove the special symbols as well.

I tried this str.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]\s/g, "_") but this does not help.

It was not asked precisely to remove accent (only special characters), but I needed to.

The solutions givens here works but they don’t remove accent: é, è, etc.

So, before doing epascarello’s solution, you can also do:

var newString = "développeur & intégrateur";_x000D_
_x000D_
newString = replaceAccents(newString);_x000D_
newString = newString.replace(/[^A-Z0-9]+/ig, "_");_x000D_
alert(newString);_x000D_
_x000D_
/**_x000D_
 * Replaces all accented chars with regular ones_x000D_
 */_x000D_
function replaceAccents(str) {_x000D_
  // Verifies if the String has accents and replace them_x000D_
  if (str.search(/[\xC0-\xFF]/g) > -1) {_x000D_
    str = str_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xC0-\xC5]/g, "A")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xC6]/g, "AE")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xC7]/g, "C")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xC8-\xCB]/g, "E")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xCC-\xCF]/g, "I")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xD0]/g, "D")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xD1]/g, "N")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xD2-\xD6\xD8]/g, "O")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xD9-\xDC]/g, "U")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xDD]/g, "Y")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xDE]/g, "P")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xE0-\xE5]/g, "a")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xE6]/g, "ae")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xE7]/g, "c")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xE8-\xEB]/g, "e")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xEC-\xEF]/g, "i")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xF1]/g, "n")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xF2-\xF6\xF8]/g, "o")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xF9-\xFC]/g, "u")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xFE]/g, "p")_x000D_
      .replace(/[\xFD\xFF]/g, "y");_x000D_
  }_x000D_
_x000D_
  return str;_x000D_
}

Source: https://gist.github.com/jonlabelle/5375315

If you have a text as

var sampleText ="ä_öü_ßÄ_ TESTED Ö_Ü!@#$%^&())(&&++===.XYZ"

To replace all special character (!@#$%^&())(&&++= ==.) without replacing the characters(including umlaut)

Use below regex

sampleText = sampleText.replace(/[`~!@#$%^&*()|+-=?;:'",.<>{}[]\/\s]/gi,'');

OUTPUT : sampleText = "ä_öü_ßÄ____TESTED_Ö_Ü_____________________XYZ"

This would replace all with an underscore which is provided as second argument to the replace function.You can add whatever you want as per your requirement

Remove the \s from your new regex and it should work - whitespace is already included in "anything but alphanumerics".

Note that you may want to add a + after the ] so you don't get sequences of more than one underscore. You can also chain onto .replace(/^_+|_+$/g,'') to trim off underscores at the start or end of the string.

var str = "hello world & hello universe"

In order to replace both Spaces and Symbols in one shot, we can use the below regex code.

str.replaceAll("\\W+","")

Note: \W -> represents Not Words (includes spaces/special characters) | + -> one or many matches

Try it!