How can I strip all punctuation from a string in JavaScript using regex?

Question

If I have a string with any type of non-alphanumeric character in it:

"This., -/ is #! an $ % ^ & * example ;: {} of a = -_ string with `~)() punctuation"

How would I get a no-punctuation version of it in JavaScript:

"This is an example of a string with punctuation"

Answer 1

If you want to remove specific punctuation from a string, it will probably be best to explicitly remove exactly what you want like

replace(/[.,/#!$%^&*;:{}=-_`~()]/g,"")

Doing the above still doesn't return the string as you have specified it. If you want to remove any extra spaces that were left over from removing crazy punctuation, then you are going to want to do something like

replace(/s{2,}/g," ");

My full example:

var s = "This., -/ is #! an $ % ^ & * example ;: {} of a = -_ string with `~)() punctuation";
var punctuationless = s.replace(/[.,/#!$%^&*;:{}=-_`~()]/g,"");
var finalString = punctuationless.replace(/s{2,}/g," ");

Results of running code in firebug console: