Regex help needed in javascript

Question

First question on here so please be nice :)

I know very little about regular expressions but I am using one in a current project which strips special characters from a string. It looks like this...

newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z ]/g, "");

It works well, but I need to modify it slightly so that it doesn't remove the £ (GBP) character.

I've tried several things but without learning regexes from the start I'm just guessing and none of it's working.

Can anyone help?

regular-expressions.info You can use that site as a quick-reference guide without having to learn anything in great detail. — Nick Presta
– Nick Presta, Commented Jan 16, 2009 at 21:25

Adam Peck · Accepted Answer · 2009-01-16 22:31:21Z

5

newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z£ ]/g, "")

or with unicode escape

newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z\u00a3\u0020]/g, "")

What you are doing with this regular expression is removing any characters that are not in the list you are providing. The minus character is used to express a range, so any character not in 0-9 (0,1,2,3,..9) A-Z and a-z are replaced by nothing (""). By adding an £ it will no longer replace it with nothing.

edited Jan 16, 2009 at 22:31

answered Jan 16, 2009 at 21:23

Adam Peck

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3 Comments

Jonathan Lonowski Over a year ago

Triptych had a good point -- outside ASCII, character sets offer no guarantees. You'd be better to use \u00a3.

rmeador Over a year ago

I'd also recommend using an escape sequence like that for the space character to improve readability because it's easy to overlook it if it's an actual space (I did when I first read the question).

Gumbo Over a year ago

Be sure that both the data and script is encoded with the same encoding. Otherwise the replacement could go wrong. You should better use the Unicode syntax as Jonathan pointed out.

Quassnoi · Accepted Answer · 2009-01-16 21:26:48Z

0

newWord = "10 -+-sdf£";
newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z £]/g, "");
WScript.StdOut.WriteLine(newWord);

answered Jan 16, 2009 at 21:26

Quassnoi

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