Remove all special characters with RegExp
javascript, regex, special-characters
Solution
var desired = stringToReplace.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '')
As was mentioned in the comments it's easier to do this as a whitelist - replace the characters which aren't in your safelist.
The caret (`^`) character is the negation of the set `[...]`, `gi` say global and case-insensitive (the latter is a bit redundant but I wanted to mention it) and the safelist in this example is digits, word characters, underscores (`\w`) and whitespace (`\s`).
Problem
I would like a RegExp that will remove all special characters from a string. I am trying something like this but it doesn’t work in IE7, though it works in Firefox. ``` var specialChars = "!@#$^&%*()+=-[]\/{}|:<>?,."; for (var i = 0; i < specialChars.length; i++) { stringToReplace = stringToReplace.replace(new RegExp("\\" + specialChars[i], "gi"), ""); } ``` A detailed description of the RegExp would be helpful as well.