Script function to remove symbol characters from string field

[leahdany]

In the Citations table, citation names sometimes contain characters/symbols that are unreadable by JavaScript and it's causing my script that works otherwise not to work. To test this I would copy a query from the citation table where the name had a special character/symbol in it - something like this query 'name=Annex A: § CLD.12.1.5 Table: Cloud service provider' - and I would only query for those citations in my GlideRecord query. It would return a row count of zero. If I modified the query where name ends with 'CLD.12.1.5 Table: Cloud service provider' it would find the two records.

I've looked up the trim function but I don't think that will work here. I need a way to remove the characters/symbols that JavaScript cannot read.

Some examples of these characters are the paragraph symbol shown here:

And whatever this symbol is shown here:

[Elijah Aromola · Accepted solution]

You could write a regular expression that filters out any thing that isn't a letter, number or period. 

var regex = /[^A-Za-z0-9\.]/
var name = gr.name
name.replace(regex, "")

This would replace any character that isn't a letter, number or period with "".

[leahdany]

Thanks! If I need to keep any other characters like parentheses would I add them in the regular expression after the period?

[Elijah Aromola]

Correct you'd also have to escape it with a backslash.

[leahdany]

Like this? var regex = /[^A-Za-z0-9\.()\]/ Or this? var regex = /[^A-Za-z0-9\.\()]/