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30

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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5  
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
Don't use a regex for something this trivial. – Steven Lu May 2 at 18:42
Unfortunately it does not look like a non-regex can allow for replacement of a string multiple times. – Steven Lu May 4 at 23:41

9 Answers

up vote 262 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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8  
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 171 down vote

One more solution which is easy to understand :)

var newstring = mystring.split('.').join(' ');
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6  
I like this for some reason. – HaggleLad Mar 23 '12 at 9:09
12  
@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
52  
5  
@BetoFrega Nothing like some empirical data to make your case :). Thanks for providing the link! – testing123 Sep 28 '12 at 4:41
show 5 more comments
up vote 38 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...

share|improve this answer
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. – Patch 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
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up vote 15 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 2 down vote 
String.prototype.replaceAll = function(character,replaceChar){
    var word = this.valueOf();

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

    return word;
}
share|improve this answer
won't this get stuck in an infinite loop if you give it something like: replaceAll('&', '&') ? (admittedly that is not a case in the OP's question) – Anentropic Jun 17 at 14:19
But "&" contains a & so the loop never runs out of things to replace (and the string keeps on growing). I tried it just now and it locked up my browser... – Anentropic Jul 3 at 9:46
up vote 1 down vote

Here's another implementation of replaceAll. Hope it helps someone.

    String.prototype.replaceAll = function (stringToFind, stringToReplace) {
        if (stringToFind === stringToReplace) return this;
        var temp = this;
        var index = temp.indexOf(stringToFind);
        while (index != -1) {
            temp = temp.replace(stringToFind, stringToReplace);
            index = temp.indexOf(stringToFind);
        }
        return temp;
    };

Then you can use it:

var myText = "My Name is George";
var newText = myText.replaceAll("George", "Michael");

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1  
This doesn't handle case-insensitive search/replace. So it is functionally equivalent to: string.split(stringToFind).join(stringToReplace) – sstur May 21 at 4:09
up vote 0 down vote

This is more concise/readable and should perform better than the one posted by Fagner Brack (toLowerCase not performed in loop):

String.prototype.replaceAll = function(search, replace, ignoreCase) {
  if (ignoreCase) {
    var result = [];
    var _string = this.toLowerCase();
    var _search = search.toLowerCase();
    var start = 0, match, length = _search.length;
    while ((match = _string.indexOf(_search, start)) >= 0) {
      result.push(this.slice(start, match));
      start = match + length;
    }
    result.push(this.slice(start));
  } else {
    result = this.split(search);
  }
  return result.join(replace);
}

Usage:

alert('Bananas And Bran'.replaceAll('An', '(an)'));
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1  
Actually, it appears escaped RegEx performs better than indexOf! Doesn't sound right, but JSPerf indicates it's much faster: jsperf.com/replaceall-indexof-vs-regex – sstur May 21 at 5:27
up vote 0 down vote 
var mystring = 'okay.this.is.a.string';
var myNewString = escapeHtml(mystring);

function escapeHtml(text) {
if('' !== text) {
    return text.replace(/&/g, "&")
               .replace(/&lt;/g, "<")
               .replace(/&gt;/g, ">")
               .replace(/\./g,' ')
               .replace(/&quot;/g, '"')
               .replace(/&#39/g, "'");
}
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