Question

I have a number of DOM elements being dynamically created on a web page. Their IDs are generated from an external list and sometimes these names may contain illegal characters for an ID like “@” or “&”.

I need to remove chracters that do not match the following rules:

• The string must begin with a letter
• The first character may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens (“-“), underscores (“_”), colons (“:”), and periods (“.”)

So, if the original string is:

99% of People are not the 1%

Then the resulting string with illegal characters removed would be:

ofPeoplearenotthe1

Can anyone help me to write the regex in Javascript that will remove characters from a string that do not follow the above requirements?

Answer 1

var str = "99% of People are not the 1%";
str = str.replace(/^[^a-z]+|[^\w:.-]+/gi, "");