jQuery remove special characters from string and more

Question

I have a string like this:

var str = "I'm a very^ we!rd* Str!ng."; 

What I would like to do is removing all special characters from the above string and replace spaces and in case they are being typed, underscores, with a - character.

The above string would look like this after the "transformation":

var str = 'im-a-very-werd-strng'; 

Answer 1

replace(/[^a-z0-9\s]/gi, '') will filter the string down to just alphanumeric values and replace(/[_\s]/g, '-') will replace underscores and spaces with hyphens:

str.replace(/[^a-z0-9\s]/gi, '').replace(/[_\s]/g, '-') 

Source for Regex: RegEx for Javascript to allow only alphanumeric

Here is a demo: http://jsfiddle.net/vNfrk/