What causes numbers to be stripped by JavaScript regex brackets?

Consider these two examples of javascript commands:

alert(' test £32 <!-- -->'.replace(/^\s+|[ ><!-]+$/g,''));

alert(' test £32 <!-- -->'.replace(/^\s+|[ <!->]+$/g,''));

The first command works correctly, displaying the message "test £32" as expected. However, the second command only displays "test £". Why does this happen? What is causing it to omit the numbers when the > symbol is moved within the brackets?

Answer №1

Shifting the position of the hyphen from the end to between the exclamation mark and greater than sign can have a significant impact. If the hyphen is not the first or last character specified within the character class, it creates a range like 'a-b' that matches all characters with code points between those of 'a' and 'b'.

The Unicode code point for the exclamation mark is U+0021, while the code point for the greater than sign is U+003E. This range includes various characters, such as digits (with code points from U+0030 to U+0039) - a detailed list can be found here. Consequently, the character class ends up matching the digits too.

To resolve this issue, either keep the hyphen at the end of the character class (as in the initial example) or escape it using a backslash to interpret it as a literal character:

alert(' test £32 <!-- -->'.replace(/^\s+|[ <!\->]+$/g,''));

Answer №2

Escaping the hyphen in regex is important, so remember to replace "-" with "\-" as "-" creates a range in regex.

Here's an example:

' test £32 <!-- -->'.replace(/^\s+|[ ><!\-]+$/g,'')

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