Remove specific character if at the beginning of a string or consecutive at any place in a string

Question

I\'m currently trying to make a regex to remove every of those character [0-9] \\ - * \\\' if they are either at the beginning of the string, end of the string or if they are co

Answer 1

You may use

^[^a-zA-Z]+|[^a-zA-Z]+$|(['* -])['* -]+|[^a-zA-Z'* -]

Replace with the backreference to Group 1 value, $1:

s.replace(/^[^a-zA-Z]+|[^a-zA-Z]+$|(['* -])['* -]+|[^a-zA-Z'* -]/g, '$1')

See the regex demo

Details

• ^[^a-zA-Z]+ - one or more chars other than ASCII letters at the start of the string
• | - or
• [^a-zA-Z]+$ - one or more chars other than ASCII letters at the end of the string
• | - or
• (['* -])['* -]+ - a ', *, space or - captured into Group 1 and then 1+ or more of such chars
• | - or
• [^a-zA-Z'* -] - a char other than ASCII letter, ', *, space or -.

Answer 2

You might use an alternation and a character class listing all the characters that you want to remove at the start of the string, the end or repeated 2 or more times using {2,}

^[ *'0-9?&_$-]+|[ *'0-9?&_$-]+$|[ *'0-9?&_$-]{2,}

Regex demo

If you want to remove all except characters a-zA-Z and a negated character class to match any character not in the character class

In the replacement use an empty string.

^[^a-zA-Z]+|[^a-zA-Z]+$|[^a-zA-Z]{2,}

Regex demo