How to remove special characters from a string using Javascript

Question

Could someone please help me to remove special characters from a string using javascript or Jquery.

Note: I would like to remove only a specific set of special characters but not replacing it with any character. Below is the code i am trying. Thanks in advance.

Code:

filename = filename.replace(/[&\/\\#,+()$~%'":*?<>{}|]/g, '').replace(/\u201C/g, '').replace(/\u201D/g, '').replace(/\s+/g, '');

Sample string Name:

Test5 & special~, #, %, & , ,, , , , , , , , “”

Actual Result:

(Test5 space special-----------------------spaces till here)

Expected Result:

Test5 special

don't use blacklists, they will always let you down because of escaping, wierdo encoding, etc. use a char whitelist (with ranges). — dandavis
– dandavis, Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 18:49

Eloy Pineda · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-04 19:46:11Z

12

Try with this function:

function removeSpecialChars(str) {
  return str.replace(/(?!\w|\s)./g, '')
    .replace(/\s+/g, ' ')
    .replace(/^(\s*)([\W\w]*)(\b\s*$)/g, '$2');
}

1st regex /(?!\w|\s)./g remove any character that is not a word or whitespace. \w is equivalent to [A-Za-z0-9_]
2nd regex /\s+/g find any appearance of 1 or more whitespaces and replace it with one single white space
3rd regex /^(\s*)([\W\w]*)(\b\s*$)/g trim the string to remove any whitespace at the beginning or the end.

edited Mar 4, 2016 at 19:46

answered Mar 4, 2016 at 18:51

Eloy Pineda

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2 Comments

user545359 Over a year ago

Thank you @Eloy. Your solution worked perfectly. I am also trying to replace some special characters that are unicode (.replace(/\u201C/g, '').replace(/\u201D/g, '')). Could you please let me know how to include in your regex.

Eloy Pineda Over a year ago

@user545359 I edited the answer to address your comment and dandavis comment. He is right, it is better to use whitelist instead of blacklist. Please let me know if this work for you.

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