Develop Reference

How to remove all symbols within a given string in Javascript?

Currently I am using the following Javascript code to convert a product title into URL-slug within the base template of my django project.
document.getElementById("title").onkeyup = function () {
document.getElementById("url_slug").value = document
.getElementById("title")
.value.toLowerCase()
.replaceAll(" ", "-")
.replaceAll("'", "")
};
This is using consecutive replaceAll() methods to replace space with dash then remove apostrophes but i would like to prevent all other symbols (e.g. +=()[]$%##... etc) as well.
Surely there must be a better way?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

You can remove all characters with regex expression /[^A-Za-z0-9]/g
document.getElementById("title").onkeyup = function () {
document.getElementById("url_slug").value = document
.getElementById("title")
.value.toLowerCase().replace(/[^A-Za-z0-9]/g,'')
.replaceAll(" ", "-")
.replaceAll("'", "")
};

Something like this?
let stringToReplace = '12+3%42()S$%\|#s'
let desired = stringToReplace.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '')
The (^) character is the negation of whatever comes in the set [...],
gi stands for: global and case-insensitive
Plus we put a safelist in there:
In our case digits, chars, underscores (\w) whitespace (\s).
So whatever is out of our whitelist gots replaced with ''

JavaScript not removing text when a uppercase letter involved

So I have a text box on my website and I have coded this to prevent certain words from being used.
window.onload = function() {
var banned = ['MMM', 'XXX'];
document.getElementById('input_1_17').addEventListener('keyup', function(e) {
var text = document.getElementById('input_1_17').value;
for (var x = 0; x < banned.length; x++) {
if (text.toLowerCase().search(banned[x]) !== -1) {
alert(banned[x] + ' is not allowed!');
}
var regExp = new RegExp(banned[x]);
text = text.replace(regExp, '');
}
document.getElementById('input_1_17').value = text;
}, false);
}
The code works perfectly and removes the text from the text box when all the letters typed are lowercase. The problem is when the text contained an uppercase letter it will give the error but the word will not be removed from the text box.

The RegExp is a good direction, just you need some flags (to make it case-insensitive, and global - so replace all occurrences):
var text="Under the xxx\nUnder the XXx\nDarling it's MMM\nDown where it's mmM\nTake it from me";
console.log("Obscene:",text);
var banned=["XXX","MMM"];
banned.forEach(nastiness=>{
text=text.replace(new RegExp(nastiness,"gi"),"");
});
console.log("Okay:",text);

Normally you should use .toLowerCase() with both sides when comparing the strings so they can logically be matched.
But the problem actually comes from the Regex you are using, where you are ignoring case sensitivity, you just need to add the i flag to it:
var regExp = new RegExp(banned[x], 'gi');
text = text.replace(regExp, '');
Note:
Note also that using an alert() in a loop is not recommended, you can change your logic to alert all the matched items in only one alert().

You seem to have been expecting something unreasonable. Lowercase strings will never match strings containing uppercase letters.
Either convert both for comparison or use lowercase banned strings. The former would be more reliable, taking future human error out of the process.

What you can do is actually convert both variables to either all caps or all lowercase.
if (text.toLowerCase().includes(banned[x].toLowerCase())) {
alert(banned[x] + ' is not allowed!');
}
Not tested but it should work. No need to use search since you don't need the index anyway. using includes is cleaner. includes docs

ASCII character not being recognized in if statement

I am trying to get a string from a html page with jquery and this is what I have.
var text = $(this).text();
var key = text.substring(0,1);
if(key == ' ' || key == ' ')
key = text.substring(1,2);
text is this  Home
And I want to skip the space and or the keycode above It appears this code does not work either. It only gets the text.substring(0,1); instead of text.substring(1,2); because the if statement is not catching.= and I am not sure why. Any help would be super awesome! Thanks!

There are several problems with the code in the question. First,   has no special meaning in JavaScript: it is a string literal with six characters. Second, text.substring(1,2) returns simply the second character of text, not all characters from the second one onwards.
Assuming that you wish to remove one leading SPACE or NO-BREAK SPACE (which is what   means in HTML; it is not an Ascii character, by the way), then the following code would work:
var first = text.substring(0, 1);
if(first === ' ' || first === '\u00A0') {
text = text.substring(1, text.length);
}
The notation \u00A0 is a JavaScript escape notation for NO-BREAK SPACE U+00A0.
Should you wish to remove multiple spaces at the start, and perhaps at the end too, some modifications are needed. In that case, using a replace operation with regular expression is probably best.

If you want remove spaces at the beginning (and end) of a string, you can use the trim function
var myvar = " home"
myVar.trim() // --> "home"
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/Trim

Javascript regular expression to replace word but not within curly brackets

I have some content, for example:
If you have a question, ask for help on StackOverflow
I have a list of synonyms:
a={one typical|only one|one single|one sole|merely one|just one|one unitary|one small|this solitary|this slight}
ask={question|inquire of|seek information from|put a question to|demand|request|expect|inquire|query|interrogate}
I'm using JavaScript to:
Split synonyms based on =
Looping through every synonym, if found in content replace with {...|...}
The output should look like:
If you have {one typical|only one|one single|one sole|merely one|just one|one unitary|one small|this solitary|this slight} question, {question|inquire of|seek information from|put a question to|demand|request|expect|inquire|query|interrogate} for help on StackOverflow
Problem:
Instead of replacing the entire word, it's replacing every character found. My code:
for(syn in allSyn) {
var rtnSyn = allSyn[syn].split("=");
var word = rtnSyn[0];
var synonym = (rtnSyn[1]).trim();
if(word && synonym){
var match = new RegExp(word, "ig");
postProcessContent = preProcessContent.replace(match, synonym);
preProcessContent = postProcessContent;
}
}
It should replace content word with synonym which should not be in {...|...}.

When you build the regexps, you need to include word boundary anchors at both the beginning and the end to match whole words (beginning and ending with characters from [a-zA-Z0-9_]) only:
var match = new RegExp("\\b" + word + "\\b", "ig");
Depending on the specific replacements you are making, you might want to apply your method to individual words (rather than to the entire text at once) matched using a regexp like /\w+/g to avoid replacing words that themselves are the replacements for others. Something like:
content = content.replace(/\w+/g, function(word) {
for(var i = 0, L = allSyn.length; i < L; ++i) {
var rtnSyn = allSyn[syn].split("=");
var synonym = (rtnSyn[1]).trim();
if(synonym && rtnSyn[0].toLowerCase() == word.toLowerCase()) return synonym;
}
});

Regular expressions include something called a "word-boundary", represented by \b. It is a zero-width assertion (it just checks something, it doesn't "eat" input) that says in order to match, certain word boundary conditions have to apply. One example is a space followed by a letter; given the string ' X', this regex would match it: / \bX/. So to make your code work, you just have to add word boundaries to the beginning and end of your word regex, like this:
for(syn in allSyn) {
var rtnSyn = allSyn[syn].split("=");
var word = rtnSyn[0];
var synonym = (rtnSyn[1]).trim();
if(word && synonym){
var match = new RegExp("\\b"+word+"\\b", "ig");
postProcessContent = preProcessContent.replace(match, synonym);
preProcessContent = postProcessContent;
}
}
[Note that there are two backslashes in each of the word boundary matchers because in javascript strings, the backslash is for escape characters -- two backslashes turns into a literal backslash.]

For optimization, don't create a new RegExp on each iteration. Instead, build up a big regex like [^{A-Za-z](a|ask|...)[^}A-Za-z] and an hash with a value for each key specifying what to replace it with. I'm not familiar enough with JavaScript to create the code on the fly.
Note the separator regex which says the match cannot begin with { or end with }. This is not terribly precise, but hopefully acceptable in practice. If you genuinely need to replace words next to { or } then this can certainly be refined, but I'm hoping we won't have to.

Remove all special characters with RegExp

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 = "!##$^&%*()+=-[]\/{}|:<>?,.";
for (var i = 0; i < specialChars.length; i++) {
stringToReplace = stringToReplace.replace(new RegExp("\\" + specialChars[i], "gi"), "");
}
A detailed description of the RegExp would be helpful as well.

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).

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

Plain Javascript regex does not handle Unicode letters.
Do not use [^\w\s], this will remove letters with accents (like àèéìòù), 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: [^èéòàùì\w\s].
Have a look at xregexp.com. XRegExp adds base support for Unicode matching via the \p{...} syntax.
var str = "Їжак::: résd,$%& adùf"
var search = XRegExp('([^?<first>\\pL ]+)');
var res = XRegExp.replace(str, search, '',"all");
console.log(res); // returns "Їжак::: resd,adf"
console.log(str.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '') ); // returns " rsd adf"
console.log(str.replace(/[^\wèéòàùì\s]/gi, '') ); // returns " résd adùf"
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/xregexp/3.1.1/xregexp-all.js"></script>

using \W or [a-z0-9] regex won't work for non english languages like chinese etc.,
It's better to use all special characters in regex and exclude them from given string
str.replace(/[~`!##$%^&*()+={}\[\];:\'\"<>.,\/\\\?-_]/g, '');

The first solution does not work for any UTF-8 alphabet. (It will cut text such as Їжак). 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<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 Tromsø == Tromso).

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 : /!##$^&%*()+=-[\x5B\x5D]\/{}|:<>?,./im

str.replace(/\s|[0-9_]|\W|[#$%^&*()]/g, "") I did sth like this.
But there is some people who did it much easier like str.replace(/\W_/g,"");

#Seagull anwser (https://stackoverflow.com/a/26482552/4556619)
looks good but you get undefined string in result when there are some special (turkish) characters. See example below.
let str="bənövşəyi 😟пурпурный İdÖĞ";
i slightly improve it and patch with undefined check.
function removeSpecials(str) {
let lower = str.toLowerCase();
let upper = str.toUpperCase();
let res = "",i=0,n=lower.length,t;
for(i; i<n; ++i) {
if(lower[i] !== upper[i] || lower[i].trim() === ''){
t=str[i];
if(t!==undefined){
res +=t;
}
}
}
return res;
}

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

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