Regex replace all commas with value

Question

I have a string that looks like this: \"Doe, John, A\" (lastname, firstname, middle initial).

I\'m trying to write a regular expression that converts the string into \"D

Answer 1

If you want to replace all non-word characters try this:

str.replace(/\W+/g, '*');

Answer 2

Yes, there is. Use the replace function with a regex instead. That has a few advantages. Firstly, you don't have to call it twice anymore. Secondly it's really easy to account for an arbitrary amount of spaces and an optional comma:

aString = aString.replace(/[ ]*,[ ]*|[ ]+/g, '*');

Note that the square brackets around the spaces are optional, but I find they make the space characters more easily readable. If you want to allow/remove any kind of whitespace there (tabs and line breaks, too), use \s instead:

aString = aString.replace(/\s*,\s*|\s+,/g, '*');

Note that in both cases we cannot simply make the comma optional, because that would allow zero-width matches, which would introduce a * at every single position in the string. (Thanks to CruorVult for pointing this out)

Answer 3

String.replace only replaces the first occurence. To replace them all, add the "g" flag for "global". You can also use character groups and the +operator (one or more) to match chains of characters:

aString.replace("[,\s]+", "*", "g");

This will replace all chains of commas and whitespaces with a *.

Answer 4

Try this out to remove all spaces and commas, then replace with *.

Myname= myname.replace(/[,\s]/,"*")

Editted as removing 'at least two items' from the pattern. But to have at least on item.

Myname= myname.replace(/([,\s]{1,})/,"*")

Reference: on Rublar. However you are better off with regexpal as per m.buettner :)