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Chris Bongers
Chris Bongers

Posted on • Originally published at daily-dev-tips.com

Removing all vowels with JavaScript

Today we'll look at a nifty solution to remove all vowels in a string using JavaScript.

The idea is that we get a string and have to return the string without the letters aeiou.

JavaScript remove all vowels

Let's dive right into the solution.

const input = 'daily dev tips';

const removeVowels = input.replace(/[aeiou]/gi, '');

console.log(removeVowels);

// 'dly dv tps'
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It works!
And yep that's all the code we need, but let's take a closer look at how it works.

The first part is to use the JavaScript replace function to replace a specific match.
The first part is the match, for which we'll use a regular expression. And the second part is the replacement.

We could, say, replace the letter i with an empty string like this.

const removeVowels = input.replace('i', '');

console.log(removeVowels);

// 'daly dev tips'
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However, you'll notice it only replaced the first occurrence. And, of course, we can only target one letter at a time.
So this is where our regular expression comes in.

We start the regular expression by wrapping it in the / / backslashes.
Then we open a pattern matcher with the [] brackets. And in between, we specify which letters should be matched.
The last part is to use gi at the end, which stands for global ignore.

  • global meaning to apply it to each occurrence, not just the first one
  • ignore means to perform a case-insensitive search

And that's it. I hope you learned something about removing vowels with JavaScript.

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Top comments (5)

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jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️ • Edited

This will not remove all vowels - accented vowels will remain - for example in the word café. To make this fully work, you should remove the accents first:

"café"
  .replace(/[aeiou]/gi, '')  // cfé

"café"
  .normalize('NFD')
  .replace(/[\u0300-\u036f]/g, '')
  .replace(/[aeiou]/gi, '')  // cf
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calinzbaenen profile image
Calin Baenen

To be fair 'å', 'ä', and 'ö' *technically* aren't accents. 🙃    /j

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

Ah good point, indeed those are not taking care off in this example :)

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calinzbaenen profile image
Calin Baenen • Edited

What does the "NFD" in .normalize(...) do?
I "know what it does", but when I read it from MDN I don't understand what it means.

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calinzbaenen profile image
Calin Baenen

Don't forget 'Å', 'Ä', and 'Ö'!