Question

I want to delete all characters like [ or ] or & in a string i.E. :
“[foo] & bar” -> “foo bar”

I don’t want to call replace 3 times, is there an easier way than just coding:

var s="[foo] & bar";

s=s.replace('[','');

s=s.replace(']','');

s=s.replace('&','');

Answer 1

Regular expressions ^[xkcd] (I feel like him ;)):

s = s.replace(/[\[\]&]+/g, '');

Reference:

• MDN – string.replace
• MDN – Regular Expressions
• http://www.regular-expressions.info/

Side note:

JavaScript’s replace function only replaces the first occurrence of a character. So even your code would not have replaced all the characters, only the first one of each. If you want to replace all occurrences, you have to use a regular expression with the global modifier.