Question

I have created a javascript sort function to sort a list of articles by title. I am going to convert all of the sortable words to capital letters so I do not have to deal with the differences associated with lower case and upper case. I am having trouble creating an expression though that wipes out all characters before the word that are not [A-Z]. I am not very familiar with regular expressions and any help would be appreciated. I am looking for something like this…

function cleanup(e) {
// delete leading not alphanum characters
// capitalize for sorting
//  str.replace(/^\s*/, '').replace(/\s*$/, ''); 
return(e);
}

Answer 1

If you use the i delimiter, the regular expression will be case insensitive, you might use this when you compare words.

Try this http://jsfiddle.net/5Rxs5/

Will replace all non a-zA-Z characters before the text:

var str = "#$DSFfd#_)#$$";

alert(str.replace(/[^a-z]+/i, ""))

If you want to remove all non a-zA-Z character do this (added the g delimiter, which means global):

var str = "#$DSFfd#_)#$$";

alert(str.replace(/[^a-z]+/gi, ""))

Uppercase first char

var str = "#$abcd#_)#$$";
str = str.replace(/[^a-z]+/i,"");
str = str.match(/(^.)(.+)/);
str = str[1].toUpperCase() + str[2];

alert(str);

Alerts:

Abcd#_)#$$