regular expression question

[Sam Ginko]

I'm trying to replace all characters that are not letters numbers and
white spaces in a string. I'm getting the characters eliminated in this
case a comma but the white space is eliminated to. How do I get around
that?


string = 'john, tony'
newTerms = string.gsub(/\W/, "")


thanks

 

[Eric I.]

I'm trying to replace all characters that are not letters numbers and
white spaces in a string. I'm getting the characters eliminated in this
case a comma but the white space is eliminated to. How do I get around
that?


string = 'john, tony'
newTerms = string.gsub(/\W/, "")

I think this does what you want, provided underscores are OK.

newTerms = string.gsub(/[^\w\s]/, "")

If underscores are not OK, then you'll need to change "\w" into "A-Za-z0-9".

Eric

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[Robert Klemme]

I'm trying to replace all characters that are not letters numbers and
white spaces in a string. I'm getting the characters eliminated in this
case a comma but the white space is eliminated to. How do I get around
that?


string = 'john, tony'
newTerms = string.gsub(/\W/, "")

I think this does what you want, provided underscores are OK.

newTerms = string.gsub(/[^\w\s]/, "")

If underscores are not OK, then you'll need to change "\w" into "A-Za-z0-9".

This is usually more efficient:

newTerms = string.gsub(/[^\w\s]+/, "")

Note the "+".

Kind regards

robert