Regex to remove leading and trailing special characters and spaces from string

Question

I'm trying to find a regex to remove all leading/trailing spaces as well as all leading/trailing special characters.

If I have the string:

test = '~!#@$@  hello this is a #! test  ^^#!^^    '

I'd like it to return as:

'hello this is a #! test'

So special characters and spaces in between the first and last letter are preserved, but all leading/trailing ones are cut out. Right now I have this:

test.replace(/[^a-zA-Z ]/g,"").replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, "")

which returns:

'hello this is a  test'

so it is removing all special characters and leading/trailing spaces. How can I preserve that "#!" between "a" and "test"?

You can just use .replace(/^[\W_]+|[\W_]+$/g,"")

Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew

2022-03-21 22:31:03 +00:00
Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 22:31 — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 22:31
stackoverflow.com/questions/26156292/…

Michel Lamsoul
– Michel Lamsoul

2022-03-21 22:31:31 +00:00
Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 22:31 — Michel Lamsoul
– Michel Lamsoul, Commented Mar 21, 2022 at 22:31

LukStorms · Accepted Answer · 2022-03-21 23:06:28Z

3

By using the unicode flag u you can use the Unicode Categories for Letters \p{L} and Numbers \p{N} in a negative character class [^...].
And match them at the start ^ or | at the end $ to get anything that's not a letter or number and is trailing or leading.

Pattern:

^[^\p{L}\p{N}]+|[^\p{L}\p{N}]+$

Test Snippet:

let test = '~!#@$@  hello this is a #! test  ^^#!^^    ';

test = test.replace(/^[^\p{L}\p{N}]+|[^\p{L}\p{N}]+$/gu, '');

document.write('['+test+']');

edited Mar 21, 2022 at 23:06

answered Mar 21, 2022 at 23:01

LukStorms

29.8k5 gold badges36 silver badges49 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

bmorgs Over a year ago

This does the trick, I appreciate the explanation of what everything means!

LukStorms Over a year ago

@bmorgs Nice. Just beware that the unicode categories were only introduced with ES2018. So some browsers might not be able to use them. The regex /^[\W_]+|[\W_]+$/g from Wiktor will work, but it'll only keep ascii letters and digits [A-Za-z0-9]. Not letters like ę ã ö

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Regex to remove leading and trailing special characters and spaces from string

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related