I have a string in javascript with some special characters inside.

var string = xxxx † yyyy § zzzz 

And I would like to remove those special characters and get only :

string = xxxx yyyy zzzz

I have tryed with this regex:

&#?[a-z0-9]+;

Like that:

string = string.replace(/&#?[a-z0-9]+;/g, "");

But the special characters are not matched with this regex.

Do you please have an idea how can I do it ?

The regex works well, see the example:

I have a string in javascript with some special characters inside.

var string = xxxx † yyyy § zzzz 

And I would like to remove those special characters and get only :

string = xxxx yyyy zzzz

I have tryed with this regex:

&#?[a-z0-9]+;

Like that:

string = string.replace(/&#?[a-z0-9]+;/g, "");

But the special characters are not matched with this regex.

Do you please have an idea how can I do it ?

The regex works well, see the example: http://regexr.?31rrj

• javascript
• regex

Share Improve this question Follow asked Aug 16, 2012 at 14:27 Milos CuculovicMilos Cuculovic 20.2k5454 gold badges164164 silver badges276276 bronze badges 1

• 1 This works fine... jsfiddle/MKjb3 – canon Commented Aug 16, 2012 at 14:36

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4 Answers 4

Sorted by: Reset to default 4

It's working fine for me.
Working example: http://jsfiddle/JwrZ6/

It's probably your syntax, strings have to be defined with " around them.

var string = "xxxx † yyyy § zzzz";

NOT

var string = xxxx † yyyy § zzzz;

You should use RegExp as follows:

string.replace( new RegExp( regexp_expression, 'g' ), '' );

Syntax for RegExp class is next:

var regexp = new RegExp(pattern [, flags]);

You can read documentation on this class.

What about using JavaScript's string.replace() method? It's probably faster, and definitely more readable than RegEx, though it might take a few lines of code.

Here's a whole writeup on replace http://www.bennadel./blog/142-Ask-Ben-Javascript-String-Replace-Method.htm - and Ben uses RegEx with string.replace as well. This should have everything you need.

You could remove HTML entities with a regex like so:

function removeEntities(str) {
  return (''+str).replace(/&\w+;\s*/g, '');
}

removeEntities("xxxx † yyyy § zzzz"); // => "xxxx yyyy zzzz"