Question

In a follow-up to this question, I need to compare two strings in a case-insensitive manner, ignoring any non-alphanumeric characters except the comma and the semicolon, in JavaScript. So

Times New Roman, Times, Sans-Serif

matches

Times New Roman,Times,SansSerif            

Can somebody get me started with the right function/approach? Is there something ready-made to do this in JS, or do I have to cut all clutter from both strings and compare them then?

Answer 1

Normalize both strings and compare them:

str1.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z0-9,;]+/g, "") == str2.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z0-9,;]+/g, "")

Here the strings are converted to lowercase and then all characters except alphanumeric characters, the comma and semicolon are removed before comparison.