Refactor 2 regular expressions in Javascript into 1 statement

Question

I have the following code, which replaces " " <-- Spaces with "-" <-- Dash.
Because some of the title text will be returned with more spaces, it converts it into 3 dashes.

Examples of Possible Titles:

• "Hello World From Jquery" <--- Notice 2 Spaces between the words, not 1
• "Main Title - Sub-Title or description here"

I would like the above titles to be turned into:

• "Hello-World-From-Jquery" <---- (Not "Hello--World--From--Jquery")
• "Main-Title-Sub-Title-or-description-here" <--- (Not "Main-Title---Sub-Title-or-desc...")

This is what I got so far, but its not ideal as you can see. Example:

var dirty_url = ui.item.label;
var url = dirty_url.replace(/\s+/g,"-");
var url = url.replace(/---/g,"-");

So basically, I want to convert all spaces and illegal characters (Its for a url) to "-" to be used in a url. I only want a maximum of 1 dash between charactors.

Answer 1

Shouldn't this work:

var dirty_url = ui.item.label;
var url = dirty_url.replace(/[-\s]+/g,'-')

Or, for more thorough:

var url = dirty_url.replace(/[-\s@#$%^&*]+/g,'-') // etc...

Though at this point, you might just want to remove all non word characters:

var url = dirty_url.replace(/\W+/g,'-')

• Ryan Kinal: Good call using character sets. That should actually work better than my answer.

Answer 2

Easy enough - regular expressions have an "alternation" operator, which works a lot like an "or".

var dirty_url = ui.item.label;
var url = dirty_url.replace(/(\s+|-{2,})/g,"-");

• Anil: God bless you!.. thats what I was looking for!!
• Anil: just testing, and it doesnt really solve my problem tho, still get 3 (---) when I only want 1
• Ryan Kinal: It looks to be working in my testing. Still, I've edited the regex to be slightly better - it will no longer replace a single dash with a single dash.