Remove all characters except alphanumeric and spaces with javascript

Question

I like the solution povided by "Remove not alphanumeric characters from string. Having trouble with the [\] character" but how would I do this while leaving the spaces in place?

I need to tokenize string based on the spaces after it has been cleaned.

Explosion Pills · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-01T06:35:06.917

67

input.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '')

Shamelessly stolen from the other answer. ^ in the character class means "not." So this is "not" \w (equivalent to \W) and not \s, which is space characters (spaces, tabs, etc.) You can just use the literal if you need.

edited Feb 01 '13 at 06:35

answered Feb 01 '13 at 05:47

Explosion Pills

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That works except for special characters like the slanted quotes ’ ” “. – Aaron Feb 01 '13 at 06:34
What do you mean? Do you want to include those characters or to exclude them? – Explosion Pills Feb 01 '13 at 06:34
Not completely. Normal ascii quotes work but when copying an pasting text from a PDF the angled quotes don't get removed while regular quotes do. – Aaron Feb 01 '13 at 06:45
I really don't know what to say .. I can't reproduce this problem – Explosion Pills Feb 01 '13 at 06:49
2

`[^\w]` = `\W` and `[^\s]` = `\S` thus the regex could be reduced to `/[\W\S]/g`, the ignore case modifier isn't needed because `\W` takes these into account. – 3limin4t0r Oct 27 '18 at 12:10
International characters also removed like ş and ö – Nime Cloud Jan 18 '23 at 09:11

Itang Sanjana · Answer 2 · 2019-11-21T12:15:02.777

I know this is an old thread, but so popular that appears at the top of a Google search. So, as an alternative, the accepted answer and comment from 3limin4t0r inspired me to:

.replace(/\W+/g, " ")

IMHO

const input = document.querySelector("input");
const button = document.querySelector("button");
const output = document.querySelector("output");

button.addEventListener("click", () => {
    output.textContent = input.value.replace(/\W+/g, " ");
})

<input>
<button>Replace</button>
<p>
  <output></output>
</p>

Remove all characters except alphanumeric and spaces with javascript

2 Answers2

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