I have look around the interwebs but I have yet to find a solid answer. This seems pretty straight forward. Let say I want to replace all characters in a string that is NOT a-z and NOT and apostrophe. For example:

with the string "jeni's splendid ice cream" i would like to replace all characters that are NOT a-z OR an apostrophe. What i have tried so far is:

var term = "jeni's splendid ice cream"
term.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z]|[^\']/g, '');

But that didn't seem to work.... Does that look correct to everyone? Just need to sanity check, lol

I have look around the interwebs but I have yet to find a solid answer. This seems pretty straight forward. Let say I want to replace all characters in a string that is NOT a-z and NOT and apostrophe. For example:

with the string "jeni's splendid ice cream" i would like to replace all characters that are NOT a-z OR an apostrophe. What i have tried so far is:

var term = "jeni's splendid ice cream"
term.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z]|[^\']/g, '');

But that didn't seem to work.... Does that look correct to everyone? Just need to sanity check, lol

• javascript
• regex

Share Improve this question Follow asked May 11, 2015 at 23:20 Alex DaroAlex Daro 42911 gold badge88 silver badges1818 bronze badges 1

• I believe part of your problem is you're not setting the value of 'term' back to itself as part of the operation: term = term.toLowerCase()... – Steve Hynding Commented May 11, 2015 at 23:26

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3 Answers 3

Sorted by: Reset to default 4

Or statements (|) belong inside the group, but in the case it is unnecessary. This regex should do the trick:

/[^a-z']/g

Working Example:

var term = "jeni's splendid ice cream"
alert(term.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z']/g, ''));

The problem is that you are looking for basically anything. Your regex is roughly equal to:

if (character !== 'value1' || character !== 'value2')

Therefore, anything works. You need to instead include the apostrophe in the regex bracket group:

/[^a-z']/g

Also, as Steve Hynding points out, you never actually change the value of term. To make the code work as you expect, it should be rewritten as:

var term = "jeni's splendid ice cream"
term = term.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z']/g, '');

Or something like this :

var term = "jeni's splendid ice cream";
term.replace(new RegExp('[^a-z\']', 'g'), '');