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22

I want to replace all the occurances of a period (.) in a JavaScript string

For example, I have:

var mystring = 'okay.this.is.a.string';

I want to get: okay this is a string.

So far I tried:

mystring.replace(/./g,' ')

but this ends up with all the string replaced to spaces.

Any idea how to resolve this?

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4  
aefxx's answer is correct, but just as an FYI is that the period character in a regex means match everything, thus everything being a space. Escaping it with the backslash means match on periods. – swilliams Jul 27 '10 at 16:52
Thanks for the tip. I have has some AHA moments (when building the app) with Regex. I really hate it _, do you have some cool, good tutorial? – Omar Abid Jul 31 '10 at 1:32
rubular.com is what you're looking for – LanguagesNamedAfterCofee Jul 17 '12 at 15:41

6 Answers

up vote 206 down vote accepted

Almost ... you need to escape the . because it has the meaning of "an arbitrary character" in a regular expression.

mystring.replace(/\./g,' ')
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5  
just to clarify, the \ escapes special characters in regular expressions, like the . in this case – realgt Sep 27 '11 at 20:30
looks like sed.. somehow.. :) – Paschalis Jul 9 '12 at 19:23
up vote 149 down vote

One more solution which is easy to understand :)

var newstring = mystring.split('.').join(' ');
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4  
I like this for some reason. – HaggleLad Mar 23 '12 at 9:09
10  
@HaggleLad because you don't need to mess with regex – ton.yeung Apr 4 '12 at 3:30
4  
Isn't this much slower than regexing? – Jasper Kennis Jun 6 '12 at 14:10
42  
4  
@BetoFrega Nothing like some empirical data to make your case :). Thanks for providing the link! – testing123 Sep 28 '12 at 4:41
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up vote 33 down vote 
/**
 * ReplaceAll by Fagner Brack (MIT Licensed)
 * Replaces all occurrences of a substring in a string
 */
String.prototype.replaceAll = function( token, newToken, ignoreCase ) {
    var _token;
    var str = this + "";
    var i = -1;

    if ( typeof token === "string" ) {

        if ( ignoreCase ) {

            _token = token.toLowerCase();

            while( (
                i = str.toLowerCase().indexOf(
                    token, i >= 0 ? i + newToken.length : 0
                ) ) !== -1
            ) {
                str = str.substring( 0, i ) +
                    newToken +
                    str.substring( i + token.length );
            }

        } else {
            return this.split( token ).join( newToken );
        }

    }
return str;
};

alert('okay.this.is.a.string'.replaceAll('.', ' '));

Faster than using regex...

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1  
thanks a lot :) – peplamb May 2 '12 at 23:41
1  
Very useful. FYI: There are rogue characters after the semi-colon in the alert statement. – Patrick Nov 27 '12 at 11:24
What you mean for "rogue character"? – Fagner Brack Feb 6 at 23:09
1  
He means entity & #8203 ; twice, which is Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH SPACE' (U+200B). More information on fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200b/index.htm – Cœur Feb 7 at 14:07
Oh got it, thanks! – Fagner Brack Feb 7 at 20:33
up vote 14 down vote 
str.replace(new RegExp(".","gm")," ")
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1  
Worked great for replace function =) – afreeland Jul 26 '12 at 18:09
up vote 3 down vote

I add double backslash to the dot to make it work. Cheer.

var st = "okay.this.is.a.string";
var Re = new RegExp("\\.","g");
st = st.replace(Re," ");
alert(st);
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up vote 1 down vote 
String.prototype.replaceAll = function(char,replaceChar){
    var word = this.valueOf();

    while(word.indexOf(char) != -1)
        word = word.replace(char,replaceChar);

    return word;
}
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