How to Replace Special Characters with Space in Javascript
In this tutorial, you will learn how to replace special characters with space in javascript. A sentence is formed with the help of multiple words and these words are separated from each other with the help of a space. By having a space, not only the words but the entire sentence becomes meaningful. Almost all unreadable and punctuation characters fall into the category of special characters.
There are numerous ways to replace special characters with space. We are going to use the simplest approach which involves the usage of the regex pattern as well as replace()
method. The replace()
method searches the string for a particular value or a regex pattern and it returns a new string with the replaced values.
In the following example, we have one global variable that holds a string. Upon click of a button, we will replace special characters with space and display the result on the screen. Please have a look over the code example and the steps given below.
HTML & CSS
- We have 3 elements in the HTML file (
div
,button
, andh1
). Thediv
element is just a wrapper for the rest of the elements. - The
innerText
for thebutton
element is“Replace”
. - We have done some basic styling using CSS and added the link to our
style.css
stylesheet inside thehead
element. - We have also included our javascript file
script.js
with ascript
tag at the bottom.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css"> <title>Document</title> </head> <body> <div class="container"> <button>Replace</button> <h1>Result</h1> </div> <script src="script.js"></script> </body> </html>
.container { text-align: center; } button { margin-top: 10px; padding: 10px 20px; }
Javascript
- We have selected the
button
element andh1
element using thedocument.querySelector()
method and stored them inbtnReplace
andoutput
variables respectively. - We have attached a
click
event listener to thebutton
element. - We have a global variable
myString
which holds a string as its value. - We are displaying the original string in the
h1
element using theinnerText
property. - In the event handler function, we have
regex
variable that holds a regex pattern/[^\w ]/g
as its value. - We are calling
replace()
method and passingregex
and space as parameters. As a result, it will replace special characters with space. The new string returned by this method will be stored in theresult
variable. - We are displaying the
result
in theh1
element using theinnerText
property.
let btnReplace = document.querySelector("button"); let output = document.querySelector("h1"); let myString = `a$b#c*d@e!`; output.innerText = myString; btnReplace.addEventListener("click", () => { let regex = /[^\w ]/g; let result = myString.replace(regex, " "); output.innerText = result; });