Question

Need a function to strip off a set of illegal character in javascript: |&;$%@"<>()+,

This is a classic problem to be solved with regexes, which means now I have 2 problems.

This is what I’ve got so far:

var cleanString = dirtyString.replace(/\|&;\$%@"<>\(\)\+,/g, "");

I am escaping the regex special chars with a backslash but I am having a hard time trying to understand what’s going on.

If I try with single literals in isolation most of them seem to work, but once I put them together in the same regex depending on the order the replace is broken.

i.e. this won’t work –> dirtyString.replace(/\|<>/g, ""):

Help appreciated!

Answer 1

What you need are character classes. In that, you’ve only to worry about the ], \ and - characters (and ^ if you’re placing it straight after the beginning of the character class “[” ).

Syntax: [characters] where characters is a list with characters.

Example:

var cleanString = dirtyString.replace(/[|&;$%@"<>()+,]/g, "");