RegEx returning SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /*/: Nothing to repeat

Question

var unicode = ['!', '@', '%', '$', '#', '^', '&', '*', '(', ')', '-', '_', '+', '=', '{', '}', '[', ']', '\\', '|', ':', ';', '\'', '"', ',', '<', '>', '.', '/', '?', '~', '`'];
var removeunicode = "my message!!@!(@^!@&(*";
for (var i = 0; i < unicode.length; i++) {
    removeunicode = removeunicode.replace(new RegExp(unicode[i], 'g'), "");
}

No idea what's the problem here, looks perfectly fine, basically its stripping all the unicode off the message I put, and RegExp seems to be messing around with me giving me

SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /*/: Nothing to repeat

can anybody help me? :)

Why do you name your array "unicode" when all the characters inside are in the ascii table? — Casimir et Hippolyte, Jul 24 '15 at 13:30

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 24 '15 at 13:30

You need to escape those special characters, but you can write it like

if (!RegExp.escape) {
  RegExp.escape = function(value) {
    return value.replace(/[\-\[\]{}()*+?.,\\\^$|#\s]/g, "\\$&")
  };
}


var unicode = ['!', '@', '%', '$', '#', '^', '&', '*', '(', ')', '-', '_', '+', '=', '{', '}', '[', ']', '\\', '|', ':', ';', '\'', '"', ',', '<', '>', '.', '/', '?', '~', '`'];
var removeunicode = "my message!!@!(@^!@&(*";

var regex = new RegExp(unicode.map(function(val) {
  return RegExp.escape(val);
}).join('|'), 'g');
removeunicode = removeunicode.replace(regex, "");
snippet.log(removeunicode);

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RegEx returning SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /*/: Nothing to repeat

1 Answers1