javascript's String replace method not working as expected

Question

I have the following sentence:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I'd like to remove any instance of "the" and "'" from the sentence so the output is the following:

Expected output:

one flew over cuckoos nest

I use the following code:

var guess = "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest";
guess = guess.toLowerCase().replace("'", "").replace("the", "");

Actual Output:

one flew over cuckoos nest

The problem is that there's a space appearing after "over" because I'm only removing "the" from that particular sentence and not the space afterwards.

I know I can fix this by using replace("the ", ""); but I would like a better way to achieve the result.

Would there be a regular expression I can use instead?

Niet the Dark Absol · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-18 00:32:47Z

3

One problem you will face is that replace only replaces the first match. In order to replace all of them, you need to use a regex with the global modifier.

guess = guess.toLowerCase().replace(/the|'/g,'').replace(/  +/g,' ');

The second replace contains two spaces followed by a +. This will fix any "broken" spaces caused by the words being removed. Also, in the first one an alternation is used to get both the the words and apostrophes in one shot.

answered Feb 18, 2013 at 0:32

Niet the Dark Absol

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1 Comment

gotnull Over a year ago

This seems to do the trick for the removal of "the", but it won't work with something like: "The King's Speech" => "kings speech".

Matt Busche · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-18 00:30:11Z

2

personally I would do

var guess = "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest";
guess = guess.toLowerCase().replace("'", "").replace(" the", "").replace("the ", "");

I'm sure there's some regEx for this, but seems overkill

I'm not a regEx expert, so I can't offer you a solution in regEx

answered Feb 18, 2013 at 0:30

Matt Busche

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3 Comments

gotnull Over a year ago

Yeah, I'm not a big regex expert myself. I think I'll just use the two replaces in the end.

Matt Busche Over a year ago

Are these all titles? It may be safe to assume none of the strings end in " the" so you could just go with replacing "the "

gotnull Over a year ago

Yeah, they're all titles. I could probably just get away with your answer actually. I'll run some tests.

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