Replacing special characters with dashes

Question

The user enters their text in #title and JQuery converts the string and places it in an input field named #url. The following code works:

$('#title').on('keyup', function (e) {            
   e.preventDefault();
   var str = $(this).val();
   str = str.replace(/\W+/g, '-').toLowerCase();
   $('#url').val(str);
});

But here is the issue, If i enter Big "Fish" Little "Fish" JQuery will convert this to: big-fish-little-fish-. So the question is how do i remove the last - at the end. Could i use something like before() and then it will do the replacement?

Answer 1

Instead of doing something to replace the final - you could also use a negative lookahead to avoid replacing anything that occurs at the end of the string and then use a subsequent statement to replace any non word char that occurs at the end with an empty space.

$('#title').on('keyup', function (e) {   
   //alert("key up");
   e.preventDefault();
   var str = $(this).val();
   str = str.replace(/\W+(?!$)/g, '-').toLowerCase();
   str = str.replace(/\W$/, '').toLowerCase();
   $('#url').val(str);
});

Example Fiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/ue1vedez/