Remove Special Characters From String in JavaScript

To remove special characters from a string in JavaScript, the easiest way to do this is to use the JavaScript String replace() method.

someString.replace(/[^a-z0-9]/gi, "");

The regex in our code /[^a-z0-9]/gi will target any character that isn’t a letter or number.

Let’s see this code in action below.

var someString = "Th##is $is$ a% s_ho-rt** ^sent{}e[]nce^ with+= [email protected]@@cial |ch\aract<,>ers()()()!."

someString = someString.replace(/[^a-z0-9]/gi, "");

console.log(someString);

#Output:
Thisisashortsentencewithspecialcharacters

If we want to allow spaces and periods as well, we would just have to add these to our regex code:

someString.replace(/[^a-z0-9. ]/gi, "");

Which would produce:

var someString = "Th##is $is$ a% s_ho-rt** ^sent{}e[]nce^ with+= [email protected]@@cial |ch\aract<,>ers()()()!."

someString = someString.replace(/[^a-z0-9. ]/gi, "");

console.log(someString);

#Output:
This is a short sentence with special characters.

When using string variables in JavaScript, we can easily perform string manipulation to change the value of the string variables.

One such manipulation is to remove special characters from a string variable.

We can easily remove special characters from a string in JavaScript.

The easiest way to remove special characters from a string using JavaScript is with the JavaScript String replace() method.

The replace() method takes two arguments: the substring we want to replace, and the replacement substring. In this case, to remove special characters, we pass the regex expression we want (/[^a-z0-9 ]/gi) as the first argument, and an empty string (“”) as the second argument.

Let’s take a look at our code one last time for removing all special characters from a string.

someString.replace(/[^a-z0-9 ]/gi, "");

Hopefully this article has been useful for you to learn how to remove special characters from a string in JavaScript.