Question

I’m looking to parse some formatting out of a field using javascript. My rule is catching some extra things which I need to fix. The regex is:

/[\((\)\s)-]/g

This regex is properly cleaning up: [phone] the problem I’m having is that it is also removing all spaces rather than just spaces following a closing parentheses. I’m no expert in regex but it was my understanding that (\)\s) would only remove the closing parentheses and space combo. What would the correct regex look like? It needs to remove all parentheses and dashes. Also, only remove spaces immediately following a closing parentheses.

The outcomes I would like are such.

The replace method i am using should work as such

var str = mystring.replace(/[\((\)\s)-]/g, '');

[phone] should become 1234567890 which is working.

leave me alone should stay leave me alone the issue is that it is becoming leavemealone

Answer 1

This will do the job:

var str = mystring.replace(/\)\s*|\(\s*|-/g, '');

Explanation of the regex:

\)\s* : Open parenthesis followed by any number of whitespace
|     : OR
\(\s* : Close parenthesis followed by any number of whitespace
|     : OR
-     : Hyphen

Since parenthesis are regex-metacharacters used for grouping they need to be escaped when you want to match them literally.