Question

I want to replace all occurences of a pattern in a string by another string. For example, lets convert all “$” to “!”:

"$$$" -> "!!!"

Plain string.replace replaces only the first match:

"$$$".replace("$", "!"); // gives "$!!"

and regexes force me to escape to special chars

"$$$".replace(/\$/g, "!"); // Pattern is now full of backslashes!

Is it possible to do the global replacement without having to manually escape the special characters? I have a bunch of patterns is a part of my code and I think readability would suffer if had to escape all of them by hand.

I’m expecting either a trick that directly does what I want or at least a way to convert a string to an excaped form useable by new RegExp

Answer 1

There is no standard regexp escape function in Javascript.

You can write your own (source) or get it from your library (dojo example)

function escape(s) {
    return s.replace(/[-/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&')
};

---

This allows us to create the custom regex object at runtime

function replace_all(string, pattern, replacement){
    return string.replace( new RegExp(escape(pattern), "g"), replacement);
}