Character substitution on Jquery

Here an easy way to search and replace each occurrence a group of characters (in this case underscore and minus) with another (in this case a space) on a specified element (in this case each A), using Jquery javascript library.

 $("a").each(function() { $(this).html($(this).html().replace(/[_-]/g," ")); });

The first argument passed on replace is a regex, if you just pass a single character (like “\_” or “-“) only first occurrence for each element.

regex (http://en.wikipedia.org)

Real world usage: I use this onto a long page, where a table has long filenames with underscore and minus in place of spaces. This trick allows in my case to show tables nicely, without caring on a mass substitution via server side scripting.

See also:

• Regex in Javascript – an useful guide
• Jquery each – to match all specified elements
• Jquery html() – read and write html content (innerHTML) of an element

https://web.archive.org/web/20090704000000*/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regex (https://web.archive.org)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090704000000*/http://evolt.org/regexp_in_javascript (https://web.archive.org)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090704000000*/http://docs.jquery.com/Utilities/jQuery.each (https://web.archive.org)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090704000000*/http://docs.jquery.com/Attributes/html (https://web.archive.org)