How to create a string "replace all" function?

Question

Every article or question I've seen pretty much says, just use:

str.replace(/yourstring/g, 'whatever');

But I want to use a variable in place of "yourstring". Then people say, just use new RegExp(yourvar, 'g'). The problem with that is that yourvar may contain special characters, and I don't want it to be treated like a regex.

So how do we do this properly?

---

Example input:

'a.b.'.replaceAll('.','x')

Desired output:

'axbx'

Answer 1

You can split and join.

var str = "this is a string this is a string this is a string";

str = str.split('this').join('that');

str; // "that is a string that is a string that is a string";