Remove punctuation with JavaScript


Punctuation marks

Here’s a string of English punctuation marks:

var punctuation = '!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~';

Remove using iteration

To remove punctuation with JavaScript, you can iterate through each letter and filter out the letters that don’t match:

var rawString = 'Hello, world!';

var rawLetters = rawString.split('');
var cleanLetters = rawLetters.filter(function(letter) {
  return punctuation.indexOf(letter) === -1;
});

var cleanString = cleanLetters.join('');

Here’s a function that removes punctuation marks using iteration:

var punctuation = '!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~';

function removePunctuation(string) {
  return string
    .split('')
    .filter(function(letter) {
      return punctuation.indexOf(letter) === -1;
    })
    .join('');
}

Remove using regex

Instead of storing the punctuation marks as a string, you can store it as a Regular Expression:

var regex = new RegExp('[' + punctuation + ']', 'g');

The following regex is the same as the above:

var regex = /[!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~]/g;

With regex, you can replace all matches with an empty string:

var rawString = 'Hello, world!';

var cleanString = rawString.replace(regex, '');

Here’s a function that removes punctuation marks using regex:

var regex = /[!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~]/g;

function removePunctuation(string) {
  return string.replace(regex, '');
}

Demo

See Repl.it demo:

You can also find the code in this Gist.



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