How can I replace underscores with spaces using a regex in Javascript?
var ZZZ = "This_is_my_name";
5 Answers
If it is a JavaScript code, write this, to have transformed string in ZZZ2:
var ZZZ = "This_is_my_name";
var ZZZ2 = ZZZ.replace(/_/g, " ");
also, you can do it in less efficient, but more funky, way, without using regex:
var ZZZ = "This_is_my_name";
var ZZZ2 = ZZZ.split("_").join(" ");
5 Comments
Justin
To quote Crescent Fresh quoting John Resig, it is actually more efficient currently doing the latter approach of .split("_").join(" ").
Adam Joseph Looze
I agree. I believe the first method will only replace the first underscore in the string
pepkin88
@AdamJosephLooze Did you check it? The
g flag takes care of replacing all occurrences.Adam Joseph Looze
ya. i had a list of cities, and it only changed the underscore in the first instance. so i used split join and it worked for me. but i see everybody else is using the same replace, so it must work properly, but it did not for me. i ran mine in a for loop to print out all cities and it only worked with first instance.
pepkin88
@AdamJosephLooze Both of my snippets are compliant with ES3, ES5 (and higher) specs. If you had a problem with the replace method with a regular expression with a
g flag (that flag is important), that may be because of a faulty JS engine implementation or because of a mistake in the code. Could you show me your code, maybe I could help? (maybe with jsbin.com)Regular expressions are not a tool to replace texts inside strings but just something that can search for patterns inside strings. You need to provide a context of a programming language to have your solution.
I can tell you that the regex _ will match the underscore but nothing more.
For example in Groovy you would do something like:
"This_is_my_name".replaceAll(/_/," ")
===> This is my name
but this is just language specific (replaceAll method)..
Comments
var str1="my__st_ri_ng";
var str2=str1.replace(/_/g, ' ');
Comments
Replace "_" with " "
The actual implementation depends on your language.
In Perl it would be:
s/_/ /g
But the truth is, if you are replacing a fixed string with something else, you don't need a regular expression, you can use your language/library's basic string replacement algorithms.
Another possible Perl solution would be:
tr/_/ /
1 Comment
Adam Batkin
You are right. Except the question didn't say anything about JavaScript when I wrote this answer.
To replace the underscores with spaces in a string, call the replaceAll() method, passing it an underscore and space as parameters, e.g. str.replaceAll('_', ' '). The replaceAll method will return a new string where each underscore is replaced by a space.
const str = 'apple_pear_melon';
// ✅ without regular expression
const result1 = str.replaceAll('_', ' ');
console.log(result1); // 👉️ "apple pear melon"
// ✅ with regular expression
const result2 = str.replace(/_+/g, ' ');
console.log(result2); // 👉️ "apple pear melon"
string.replace(/_/, " "):%s/_/ /g