There are several techniques you were taught that can be used to this purpose.
you should review the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures certification, or you should work thorugh the Certified Full Stack Developer Curriculum
You should not look through Responsive Web Design to review how to work with strings
Did you work through the projects leading up to this one? The Calorie Counter project covers basic regular expressions, but the coverage of regular expressions in the Certified Full Stack Developer curriculum is much, much better.
You also don’t need regex to do this.
Yes. I agree, but use of a regular expression in this project is so much cleaner. And something we should all try to get our heads around.
Ehh, I dunno about cleaner. I think character codes are perfectly ‘clean’. But practicing regex is good every though it’s a relatively infrequently used tool for most devs.
You two (Jeremy LT and ILM) have me confused but potentially I have not come across clearly as well. I seems to the logical way to convert for example 0_0 (: /-\ 
0-0 to 0000 is by a replace method. I was intending to ask where is the course it mentioned how to by this method remove non-alphanumeric values. You appear to suggest while you can do it this way that was not the way you were taught in the course. I have more to say but struggling for the words.
No matter which course you’ve taken, there exists sufficient content to allow you to complete this project
However looked through all the programs I cannot find that way.
Based my experience so far The stack developer course (javaScript) is really drawn out for those with knowledge of other programming languages. The Responsive web design (Javascript) jumps to complicated programs quickly and cover a vast amount of information before a certification project.
Last message was sent in a stressed mindset. I am going to leave javaScript for the day and have another look at programs on Monday or later to see if I can find this other and intended way.
There is no single ‘right’ way to solve this project. There are many valid ways to solve it. The previous projects aren’t intended to give you something to closely replicate here but rather give you tools you can use to make a solution here.
Yes but they will give me commands to combine. At the moment I cannot remember any other way non-regex way to do it except a very longwinded way with if loops.
If statements and for loops are powerful. Don’t dismiss them prematurely. They are valid and can help you express your logic before you find a shorter syntax to do the same thing.