javascript - replace dash (hyphen) with a space

Question

I have been looking for this for a while, and while I have found many responses for changing a space into a dash (hyphen), I haven't found any that go the other direction.

Initially I have:

var str = "This-is-a-news-item-"; 

I try to replace it with:

str.replace("-", ' '); 

And simply display the result:

alert(str); 

Right now, it doesn't do anything, so I'm not sure where to turn. I tried reversing some of the existing ones that replace the space with the dash, and that doesn't work either.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

This fixes it:

let str = "This-is-a-news-item-"; str = str.replace(/-/g, ' '); alert(str); 

There were two problems with your code:

1. First, String.replace() doesn’t change the string itself, it returns a changed string.
2. Second, if you pass a string to the replace function, it will only replace the first instance it encounters. That’s why I passed a regular expression with the g flag, for 'global', so that all instances will be replaced.