Question

17

How to remove specific character surrounding a string?

rated 0 times [ 24] [ 7] / answers: 1 / hits: 24255 / 8 Years ago, sun, april 3, 2016, 12:00:00

I have this string:

var str = ? this is a ? test ?;

Now I want to get this:

var newstr = this is a ? test;

As you see I want to remove just those ? surrounding (in the beginning and end) that string (not in the middle of string). How can do that using JavaScript?

Here is what I have tried:

var str = ? this is a ? test ?;

var result = str.trim(?);

document.write(result);

So, as you see it doesn't work. Actually I'm a PHP developer and trim() works well in PHP. Now I want to know if I can use trim() to do that in JS.

It should be noted I can do that using regex, but to be honest I hate regex for this kind of jobs. Anyway is there any better solution?

Edit: As this mentioned in the comment, I need to remove both ? and whitespaces which are around the string.

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gideons

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2 Years ago

answered 8 Years ago madelyn · Accepted Answer

Search for character mask and return the rest without.

This proposal the use of the bitwise not ~ operator for checking.

~ is a bitwise not operator. It is perfect for use with indexOf(), because indexOf returns if found the index 0 ... n and if not -1:
value  ~value   boolean

 -1  =>   0  =>  false

  0  =>  -1  =>  true

  1  =>  -2  =>  true

  2  =>  -3  =>  true

  and so on 

function trim(s, mask) {

    while (~mask.indexOf(s[0])) {

        s = s.slice(1);

    }

    while (~mask.indexOf(s[s.length - 1])) {

        s = s.slice(0, -1);

    }

    return s;

}



console.log(trim('??? this is a ? test ?', '? '));

console.log(trim('abc this is a ? test abc', 'cba '));