Regex Javascript: Remove single charcaters in Text

Question

I imagine this question is very simple for experts, yet I can't figure this one out (not even reading through stackoverflow & google):

I want to remove all alphanumeric and umlaut (and double S) single characters (i.e. or if not possible, then surrounded by spaces). Here what I tried:

    var a = "text 0 1 2 3 a 4 text text";
    a = a.replace(/\b\s+[a-zA-Z0-9äöüÄÖÜß]\s+\b/g, ' ')
    a = a.replace(/\s\s+/g, ' ') + "\n" //remove double spaces
    alert(a)

What I get: text 1 3 4 text text Expected output: text text text

see also: Fiddle snippet

edit: updated my try according to comments thanks @stanislav-Šolc

\s* means zero or more, that is way how you loose all numbers at text. Change \s* to any other multipler, to \s+ fo example, or you can use word boundary (anchor) \b[0-9]\b that will handle even single chars on the end of the line... — Stanislav Šolc
– Stanislav Šolc, Commented Jun 5, 2016 at 11:57

LukStorms · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-05 12:11:53Z

1

A positive lookahead (?= ) could help here.

var a = "text 0 ä 1 ë 2 i      text ";
a = a.replace(/ [a-zA-Z0-9äëïöÄËÜÏÖ](?= )/g, '');
a = a.replace(/  +/g, ' ');
alert(a);

The first regex will look for a space and a character, followed by a space.

So it will return :

text text

And if you want to be more thourough about removing single characters then this could be tried:

a = a.replace(/ [^ ](?= )/g, '');

But that could probable remove also stuff you want

answered Jun 5, 2016 at 12:11

LukStorms

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2 Comments

user2305193 Over a year ago

reading up on lookaheads, thanks, / [^ ](?= )/g was exactly what I needed. I was looking into word boundaries etc... this is perfect thanks

LukStorms Over a year ago

I actually first should about using a wordboundairy \b. But that doesn't seem to work well with the umluads.

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