Javascript remove all characters from string which are not numbers, letters and whitespace

Question

With JavaScript I would like to remove all characters from a string which are not numbers, letters and whitespace. So remove characters like '%#$&@* so something like:

Player's got to * play! #justsaying

would become:

Players got to play justsaying

How can I do this, I'm not sure about regex.

Answer 1

As @chris85 said, you can use the regular expression [^0-9a-z-A-Z] to replace all the characters that are not letters, numbers, or whitespace.

Here is a function that will do what you want:

function clean(str) {
    return str.replace(/[^0-9a-z-A-Z ]/g, "").replace(/ +/, " ")
}

The second replace call is needed to remove the runs of extra whitespace that are made from removing a character that is between spaces.

Answer 2

Use replace

string.replace(/[^A-Z\d\s]/gi, '')

Note the two flags at the end of the regex

g - stands for global, and means that every such instance of the regular expression will be found

i - stands for case insensitive. That means it will match both lower case and uppercase characters

Playing with your string, it returns this output

"Players got to  play justsaying"

To transform two or more whitespace characters into a single whitespace, you could hain another replace method to the existing ones.

string.replace(/[^A-Z\d\s]/gi, '').replace(/\s+/g, ' ')

The key here is the + character, which finds one or more.

It's probably possible to do it more efficiently, but I'm an amateur in Regex.