javaScript – Replace all occurrences of a forward slash in a string

#javascript #webdev #codenewbie

Today I learned an easy solution to replace all occurrences of a forward slash in string in javascript. I had to convert an URL to a string in another format, so initially, I tried str.replace() method like

str.replace('/', ":");

But to my surprise, it only replaced the first occurrence in the string.
Then I thought oh I might need to use a regular expression. But I failed to make a regular expression, I always do.
But then I find a much simple way.

str.split('/').join(':')

Let me know if you find it useful.

Top comments (6)

Aaron Choo • Jun 26 '20

If you still need the regex way of doing this:

str.replace(/\//g, ":")

Explanation: anything enclosed within a pair of forward slashes / signals that it is a regex. As such, we need to use the backslash to escape the forward slash to get \/. The g at the end is a flag to perform a global search, and thus replaces all occurrence of / with :.