Question

I feel silly asking this because I’m betting the answer is staring right at me but here goes.

I’m taking a string from the CSS style textDecoration and trying to remove the underline portion of the string (and any whitespace around it). It returns true when I run test() but when I do the replace method the string is unaltered. Help?

My code:

    textDecoration = function(str) {
            var n_str = str + '|/\s' + str + '|/\s' + str + '/\s|' + str + '/\s';  
            var nre = new RegExp(n_str, "g");
            debug_log('Found or not: ' + nre.test(txt));
            txt.replace(nre, '');
            debug_log('Result: ' + txt);
            debug_log('-----------------------');
    }

    var txt = "underline";
    debug_log('-----------------------');
    debug_log('Starting String: ' + txt);
    textDecoration("underline");
    txt = "underline overline line-through";
    debug_log('-----------------------');
    debug_log('Starting String: ' + txt);
    textDecoration("underline");
    txt = "overline underline line-through";
    debug_log('-----------------------');
    debug_log('Starting String: ' + txt);
    textDecoration("underline");
    txt = "overline line-through underline";
    debug_log('-----------------------');
    debug_log('Starting String: ' + txt);
    textDecoration("underline");

Output:

Answer 1

replace() returns a new string with the replaces and don’t change the actual string. You should do something like:

var newString = txt.replace(nre, '');
debug_log('Result: ' + newString);