Remove a letter(:) from a string

Question

I have strings like Name:, Call:, Phone:....and so on in my table. I am learning jQuery and was able to access the text. My tutorial has used trim() to remove any whitespaces. But I want o remove ":" from the end of each string (and yes, it always lies in the end after calling trim() method). So how to achieve it.

Its my code:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function ()
    {
        $(':input[type=text], textarea').each
    (
    function ()
    {
        var newText = 'Please enter your ' +
    $(this).parent().prev().text().toLowerCase().trim();
        $(this).attr('value', newText);
    }).one('focus', function ()
    {
        this.value = '', this.className = ''
    }).addClass('Watermark').css('width', '300px');
    });
</script>

trim(":") did not help...

Answer 1

You can replace all : characters:

var str = '::a:sd:';
str = str.replace(/:/g,''); // str = 'asd';

Or use a handy rtrim() function:

String.prototype.rtrim = function(character) {
    var re = new RegExp(character + '*$', 'g');
    return this.replace(re, '');
};

var str = '::a:sd:';
str = str.rtrim(':'); // str = '::a:sd';

Answer 2

In this case just use the plain old JavaScript replace or substr methods.

You can also use a regular expression that looks for colon as the last character (the character preceding the regexp end-of-string anchor "$").

"hi:".replace(/:$/, "")

hi

"hi".replace(/:$/, "")

hi

"h:i".replace(/:$/, "")

h:i

This is a simplified, inline version of the rtrim function in Blender's answer.

EDIT: Here is a test fiddle for Blender's corrected rtrim function. Note that his RegExp will delete multiple occurrences of the specified character if the string ends with multiple instances of it consecutively (example bolded below).

http://jsfiddle.net/fGrPb/5/

input = '::a:sd:' output = '::a:sd'; input = 'hi:' output = 'hi'; input = 'hi:::' output = 'hi'; input = 'hi' output = 'hi'; input = 'h:i' output = 'h:i'