Question

What I need is something that will match words that contain special symbols (except ?, ! and .) and URL’s.
Here’s what I already have, but it doesn’t quite work.

re = new RegExp('(http://\S+|\S*[^\w\s,.":]\S*)');

text = '@hello how are you? http://example.com';
clean = text.replace(re, '');

The current output is:

> 'hello how are you? http://example.com'

The output should be:

> '  how are you? '

Answer 1

You need to use global in the RE

text.replace(/(http:\/\/\S+|\S*[^\w\s,.":?]\S*)/g,'');

I also added “?” to your set since it seems you want that included.