I have searched for a general solution to this but only find answers to peoples specific questions.
Basically, I want to know how to generally use .replace() to repl
What you are looking for are called regular expressions. For more information, you can visit a site like: http://www.regular-expressions.info/
Note that regular expressions are not specific to JavaScript.
For your specific example:
string.replace(/abc.+xyz/,"abc"+newString+"xyz");
. means any character, and + means one or more occurences.
If you have more than one replacement to do, try:
string.replace(/abc.+?xyz/g,"abc"+newString+"xyz");
g stands for general, and ? is the lazy quantifier, meaning that it will stop at the next occurence of xyz in the string.