Question

I am creating vanity urls and I want to only allow the users to have
'a-z', 'A-Z', '0-9, '.', ' ', '-', '_' in their urls.

So given a string I would like to strip all characters that are not in this group.

What is the best way to do this?

Originally I was looping over the string and then checking if the character was in an this string.

But that’s obviously not very efficient…

Answer 1

str = str.replace(/[^\w\s.-]/g,'');

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/6Efc5/1/

This is a regex that matches anything not in the [^] set globally, and replaces it with an empty string:

• \w alpha-numeric and underscore
• - dash
• \s space
• . period

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EDIT: Because I was in the character set, I really didn’t need to escape the . and -. Fixed.

EDIT2: As noted by @Hailwood, the \s will match several types of whitespace characters. To allow only a ' ' character, and not others like tab or new line characters, replace \s with a simple space.