Replace any of several characters with underscore

Question

I have a simple task but I'm not sure of the syntax.

I have a string and want to replace any occurrences of '[', ']', or '.' with an underscore ('_').

I know that string.replace() supports regular expressions, which also give special treatment to [ and ].

Hi just to clarify this is the square brackets and single quote is included ? or only the dot and the comma ? — German, Oct 26 '21 at 20:03

Ran Turner · Answer 1 · 2021-10-26T20:16:17.280

1

Use replaceAll for that

** Note, replace will also work since this a global search.

const src = '/[[\].]/g';
const target = '_';

const formated = string.replaceAll(src, target);

edited Oct 26 '21 at 20:16

answered Oct 26 '21 at 19:56

Ran Turner

Why should I use `replaceAll()`? `replace()` seems to work. – Jonathan Wood Oct 26 '21 at 20:07
`replaceAll()` replaces all occurrences of search, while `replace()` only the first occurence. – Ran Turner Oct 26 '21 at 20:09
But `replace()` appears to be working and replaces all occurences. – Jonathan Wood Oct 26 '21 at 20:10
You sure you don't have only one occurrence? – Ran Turner Oct 26 '21 at 20:11
I have one of each of the three characters. So just one of each. – Jonathan Wood Oct 26 '21 at 20:13
My bad, replace will also work since this is a global search (/g) – Ran Turner Oct 26 '21 at 20:15

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 26 '21 at 19:55

0

Escape the characters with special treatment with backslash.

string = string.replace(/[[\].]/g, '_');

Note that [ and . don't receive special treatment inside [].

answered Oct 26 '21 at 19:55

Barmar

2 Answers2