hello
why does this code matches both \W and _ if it is inside a character set [] ?
does’t s character set matches this or that but never 2 things?
var str = "fdfd.////__/f";
console.log(str.replace(/[\W_]/gi,""); // will replace both \W and _
It is only matching one at a time, but because you are using the greedy flag, it will match multiple times.
@ArielLeslie
It is actually a global flag not greedy.
@tomer-n
https://regex101.com/r/FPqRIC/1
hope this helps answers your question
i want to find everything that is not words and underscores _ .
i want to replace them with “” with the replace method.
what i don’t understand is why it matches this \W and this _ if it is inside brackets []
I thought that brackets find one thing at a time only.
They do (only match one character), just reread what was already written and check out thisiswhale’s link, where you’ll have the matching coloured.
g means repeat, if that makes it easier to understand.
What string output did you expect? What you describe matches your code …
hey @lynxlynxlynx,
doesn’t g means global? also the regex website says it doesn’t return after a match.
the output is fine. I just try to understand what happened…
Of course it stands for global … And because it doesn’t stop after the first match, it repeats the match after each substitution, checking if there’s still anything to do — until it reaches the end of the input string. IOW it’s killing the bad characters one at a time.
thanks mate i got it
Tomato toh-mah-toh, depending on the context you learned regular expressions in.
It’s most useful/least ambiguous to refer to the g flag as “global”, because:
For example, the regex /(ab){5}/ matches 5 “ab” substrings in a row (i.e. the substring must repeat 5 times). If we change it to /(ab){1,5}/, it matches as many as it can up to 5 (i.e. it’s greedy).