Regex help needed in javascript

Question

Hi,

First question on here so please be nice :)

I know very little about regular expressions but I am using one in a current project which strips special characters from a string. It looks like this...

newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z ]/g, "");

It works well, but I need to modify it slightly so that it doesn't remove the £ (GBP) character.

I've tried several things but without learning regexes from the start I'm just guessing and none of it's working.

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z£ ]/g, "")

or with unicode escape

newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z\u00a3\u0020]/g, "")

What you are doing with this regular expression is removing any characters that are not in the list you are providing. The minus character is used to express a range, so any character not in 0-9 (0,1,2,3,..9) A-Z and a-z are replaced by nothing (""). By adding an £ it will no longer replace it with nothing.

Answer 2

newWord = "10 -+-sdf£";
newWord = newWord.replace(/[^0-9A-Za-z £]/g, "");
WScript.StdOut.WriteLine(newWord);