How to remove specific characters in a particular element

Question

How do i remove the character "," from a div. for example,

<div class="something">This, is, the, text. </div>

Now i want to remove all the ","s from that div using javascript.

Please forgive me for being too noob in javascript.

Answer 1

var elements = document.getElementsByClassName("something");
elements[0].innerHTML = elements[0].innerHTML.replace(/,/g,'');

Check this example out: http://jsfiddle.net/QpJNZ/

Update:

var elements = document.getElementsByClassName("something");
for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; ++i) {
  elements[i].innerHTML = elements[i].innerHTML.replace(/,/g,'');
}

This is how to make this work for more than one element.

Check this example out: http://jsfiddle.net/VBEaQ/2/

Answer 2

If the element only contains text and no other elements, you can simply do get the inner content of the element then perform string replacement:

element.innerHTML = element.innerHTML.replace(/,/g, '');

To replace all occurrences of a character sequence, you have to use a regular expression with the global modifier.

If the element contains other elements, you can iterate over all child text nodes:

function replace(element, needle, repl) {
    var children = element.childNodes,    // get a list of child nodes
        pattern = new RegExp(needle, 'g'),  // prepare pattern
        child, i, l;

    for(i = 0, l = children.length; i < l; i++) {
        child = children[i];
        if(child.nodeType === 3) {       // if we deal with a text node
            child.nodeValue = child.nodeValue.replace(pattern, repl); // replace
        }
    }
}

Things to watch out for:

• If the text you are searching for contains special regular expression characters, you have to properly escape them first.

• If you want to replace the text inside child elements as well, you have to call this function recursively for each element node (nodeType is 1).

Reference: String.replace, Node.childNodes, Node.nodeType, Node.nodeValue, RegExp