Replace one or more of the same character in a string

JavaScript
1

Hi,

I know the basic method to remove all occurrences of a hyphen (-) :

string.replace(/-/g, '');

I have a string that has one or more hyphens multiple times:

---this-is-my--string----that-i--want---to-change-

and I want to accomplish two things

  1. Replace all multiple hyphens with one single hyphen,
  2. Remove hyphens at the beginning and at the end.

The result should be:

this-is-my-string-that-i-want-to-change

Thanks for any ideas.

2

string.replace(/^-+|-+$/gi,‘’) will replace all hyphens at beginning and end of string.
string.replace(/-+/gi,‘-’) will replace one or more hyphens with a single hyphen, globally.
Using either without the global attribute will remove only the first occurrence of hyphen.

HTH,

:slight_smile:

3

EDIT: I should have made a little bit more research before asking. Anyway here is the solution in case someone else needs the same thing:

string.replace(/[-]+/g, '-')

If I am not wrong,

[-] : means to replace a hyphen
[-]+ : means to replace one or more hyphens (-, --, —)
/[-]+/g : means to replace multiple occurrences of one or more hyphens as in my sample string above.

Thank you, Wolf, just saw your post after posting mine :slight_smile: May I ask what does “i” do? Your code also works without “i”.

4

Yet another solution:



$str = "---this-is-my--string----that-i--want---to-change-";

echo $x = trim( str_replace('--', '-', $str ), '-' );

// trim removes '-' from front and back of $str
5

Don’t want to sound trite, but it looks like the code you suggest is PHP, but the OP asked the question in the JavaScript/jQuery forum. There is no TRIM() in JavaScript (that I am aware of.)

V/r,

:slight_smile:

UPDATE: Well, yes and no. I guess it depends upon what version of JavaScript. If the String.prototype.trim doesn’t exist, you can code for it. But it only affects whitespace, not hyphens.

6

Whoops, sorry about not being PHP.