I'm trying to strip a string to leave only word characters remaining. For anything using the Latin alphabet, I can manage it quite easily with

str = str.replace(/\W/g, '').replace(/[0-9]/g, '');

(I think I probably don't need both replaces, but I'm very new to regular expressions and not sure what I'm doing)

However, this also strips out foreign characters such as chinese or arabic.

How would I write a function to do this?

strOne = "test!(£)98* string";
strTwo = "你好，325!# 世界";

cleanUp (strOne); // Output: "test string"
cleanUp (strTwo); // Output: "您好 世界"

(In case anyone is wondering, the chinese is me running "hello world" through an online translator)

On a library note, I don't know if it's relevant but I'm using dojo and would like to avoid jquery if possible.

I'm trying to strip a string to leave only word characters remaining. For anything using the Latin alphabet, I can manage it quite easily with

str = str.replace(/\W/g, '').replace(/[0-9]/g, '');

(I think I probably don't need both replaces, but I'm very new to regular expressions and not sure what I'm doing)

However, this also strips out foreign characters such as chinese or arabic.

How would I write a function to do this?

strOne = "test!(£)98* string";
strTwo = "你好，325!# 世界";

cleanUp (strOne); // Output: "test string"
cleanUp (strTwo); // Output: "您好 世界"

(In case anyone is wondering, the chinese is me running "hello world" through an online translator)

On a library note, I don't know if it's relevant but I'm using dojo and would like to avoid jquery if possible.

• javascript
• regex

• I suppose you can look into unicodes like in this SO post, another link or you can convert the characters to english using a plugin then cleanup, the only plugin I can think for now is a jquery one though :) google's translate plugin – user2587132 Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 10:31
• 1 To merge both replaces you can use |. The pipe character means this or that (this|that), so in your case the regex would be /\W|[0-9]/g. – Ron Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 10:43

2 Answers 2

you need a regex pattern using unicode character properties, namely \P{Letter}.

unfortunately the native js regex engine does not support these constructs (cf. mdn docs). however there is (at least) this third-party library which includes a js plugin adding the support.

code sample:

var regex, str;

str = "whatever";

regex = XRegExp('\\P{Letter}'); 
str   = XRegExp.replace(str, regex, '');

\W is equivalent to [^a-zA-Z_0-9]

instead you need to list all the characters that you want to strip out.

str = str.replace(/[put the characters you want to get rid of here]*/g, '');