Javascript remove special characters from beginning and end of string

Question

I need to hyphenate a string in javascript. The string is a url (e.g '/home/about/').

My current regex, is working but the output is not as desired.

If the first/last character of the string is a special character, it should be removed and instead of being changed into a hyphen.

Example:

    var string = '/home/about/';
    string.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/g, '-').toLowerCase(); 
    // Returns -home-about- but I need home-about

Answer 1

^\/ means / at begin and \/$ means / at the end. joined them with pipe to handle both removals from the end.

string = string.replace(/^\/|\/$/g, '').toLowerCase(); 

Then do your regex operation:

string.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/g, '-').toLowerCase(); 

Answer 2

You can simply do this:

var s="/home/about/";
s.match(/[^\/]+/g).join('-'); // home-about