I wanted to write a javascript function to sanitize user input and remove any unwanted and dangerous characters.

It must allow only the following characters:

• Alfanumeric characters (case insentitive): [a-z][0-9].


• Inner whitespace, like word1 word2.


• Spanish characters (case insentitive): [áéíóúñü].


• Underscore and hyphen [_-].


• Dot and comma [.,].


• Finally, the string must be trimmed with trim().

My first attempt was:

function sanitizeString(str){

str = str.replace(/[^a-z0-9áéíóúñü_-s.,]/gim,);

return str.trim();

}

But if I did:

sanitizeString(word1nword2)

it returns:

word1

word2

So I had to rewrite the function to remove explícitly tnfrv:

function sanitizeString(str){

str = str.replace(/([^a-z0-9áéíóúñü_-s.,]|[tnfrv])/gim,);

return str.trim();

}

I'd like to know:

1. Is there a better way to sanitize input with javascript?


2. Why n and t doesn't matches in the first version RegExp?