remove all instances of a character in a string with something else javascript

Question

I need to replace all   with a space. The below is the string that gets spitted out dynamically and i need to hide the br tags...

M,W,Th,F 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM<br />Tu 7:30 AM - 6:00 PM<br />

What am i doing wrong?is it possible to replace all other br tags with a comma except the last one, which will be repalced by a space

$('.WorkingHours').text().replace(/<br />/g, " ");

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2145988/jquery-string-replace Answer is here. — PhyBandit, Mar 14 '12 at 14:58

Felix Kling · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-14T15:20:07.950

There are three issues with your code:

$('.WorkingHours').text() won't contain any HTML (so no br tags either), it only returns the text content of elements.
$('.WorkingHours').text() returns:

M,W,Th,F 7:30 AM - 4:00 PMTu 7:30 AM - 6:00 PM

whereas $('.WorkingHours').html() returns:

M,W,Th,F 7:30 AM - 4:00 PM Tu 7:30 AM - 6:00 PM 
You have to escape the inner backslash in your expression. Edit: Having a look at the output of .html() it actually does not contain   but  . This might depend on the doctype of the document (not working example, working example).
You have to assign the value back to the element.

You might be able to do

$('.WorkingHours').html(function(i, html) {
    return html.replace(/<br\s*\/?>/g, " "); 
});

but it would be much cleaner to not use regular expressions at all:

$('.WorkingHours').find('br').replaceWith(' ');

This finds all br element nodes and replaces them with a text node containing only a space.

Update (in response to one of your comments): If you want to replace the last br with a full stop, you can use .last():

$('.WorkingHours')
 .find('br').last().replaceWith('.')
 .end().replaceWith(' ');

Shouldn't $('.WorkingHours').find('br').remove() be more appropriate? — Selvakumar Arumugam, Mar 14 '12 at 15:00

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 15:00

Couple things:

use html() to get the HTML of the node:

var rawHTML = $('.WorkingHours').html();

Use \ to escape the / within your regex:

/<br \/>/g

Set the HTML to the return value of the replace function:

$('.WorkingHours').html(rawHTML.replace(/<br \/>/g, ' ');

var rawHTML = $('.WorkingHours').html();
$('.WorkingHours').html(rawHTML.replace(/<br \/>/g, ' ');

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 14:57

0

using .text() instead of .html() to remove html tags

.text() only returns the inner text, instead of the inner html.

answered Mar 14 '12 at 14:57

bevacqua

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 14:57

0

I think you need to escape the forward-slash in the expression, e.g.

$('.WorkingHours').text().replace(/<br \/>/g, " ");

answered Mar 14 '12 at 14:57

danwellman

`$('.WorkingHours').text()` won't contain any HTML, so no `
` tags either. – Felix Kling Mar 14 '12 at 15:12

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 14:58

0

You need to escape the forward slash in the  :

$('.WorkingHours').text().replace(/<br \/>/g, " ");

answered Mar 14 '12 at 14:58

Richard Dalton

how do i find out if it is the last br tag and replace it with "."?? – Anjana Sharma Mar 14 '12 at 15:01
Your fiddle works because you are working with a string, but `$('.WorkingHours').text()` won't contain any HTML. – Felix Kling Mar 14 '12 at 15:09

5 Answers5