Remove all special characters with RegExp

Question

I would like a RegExp that will remove all special characters from a string  I am trying something like this but it doesn   t work in IE7  though it works in Firefox   var specialChars          amp       -         lt  gt        for  var i   0  i  lt  specialChars length  i        stringToReplace   stringToReplace replace new RegExp        specialChars i    gi             A detailed description of the RegExp would be helpful as well

User · Answer

Plain Javascript regex does not handle Unicode letters  Do not use    w s   this will remove letters with accents  like                not to mention to Cyrillic or Chinese  letters coming from such languages will be completed removed  You really don t want remove these letters together with all the special characters  You have two chances   Add in your regex all the special characters you don t want remove   for example                 w s   Have a look at xregexp com  XRegExp adds base support for Unicode matching via the  p      syntax    x000D   x000D  var str            r  sd    amp  ad  f  var search   XRegExp       lt first gt   pL        var res   XRegExp replace str  search      all     console log res      returns          resd adf  console log str replace     w s  gi            returns   rsd adf  console log str replace     w             s  gi            returns   r  sd ad  f  x000D   lt script src  https   cdnjs cloudflare com ajax libs xregexp 3 1 1 xregexp-all js  gt  lt  script gt  x000D   x000D   x000D

User · Answer

var desired   stringToReplace replace     w s  gi        As was mentioned in the comments it s easier to do this as a whitelist - replace the characters which aren t in your safelist    The caret     character is the negation of the set        gi say global and case-insensitive  the latter is a bit redundant but I wanted to mention it  and the safelist in this example is digits  word characters  underscores   w  and whitespace   s

User · Answer

str replace   s  0-9    W       amp      g      I did sth like this  But there is some people who did it much easier like str replace   W  g

User · Answer

The first solution does not work for any UTF-8 alphabet   It will cut text such as        I have managed to create a function which does not use RegExp and use good UTF-8 support in the JavaScript engine  The idea is simple if a symbol is equal in uppercase and lowercase it is a special character  The only exception is made for whitespace       function removeSpecials str        var lower   str toLowerCase        var upper   str toUpperCase         var res           for var i 0  i lt lower length    i            if lower i     upper i     lower i  trim                       res    str i             return res      Update  Please note  that this solution works only for languages where there are small and capital letters  In languages like Chinese  this won t work   Update 2  I came to the original solution when I was working on a fuzzy search  If you also trying to remove special characters to implement search functionality  there is a better approach  Use any transliteration library which will produce you string only from Latin characters and then the simple Regexp will do all magic of removing special characters   This will work for Chinese also and you also will receive side benefits by making Troms      Tromso

User · Answer

why dont you do something like   re      a-z0-9    i  var isValid   re test yourInput     to check if your input contain any special char

User · Answer

I use RegexBuddy for debbuging my regexes it has almost all languages very usefull  Than copy paste for the targeted language  Terrific tool and not very expensive   So I copy pasted your regex and your issue is that     are special characters in regex  so you need to escape them  So the regex should be          amp       -  x5B x5D        lt      im

User · Answer

Note that if you still want to exclude a set  including things like slashes and special characters you can do the following   var outString   sourceString replace            amp        -         lt  gt               gi         take special note that in order to also include the  minus  character  you need to escape it with a backslash like the latter group   if you don t it will also select 0-9 which is probably undesired

[javascript] Remove all special characters with RegExp

Plain Javascript regex does not handle Unicode letters.

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