Character substitution on Jquery

Here an easy way to search and replace each occurrence a group of characters (in this case underscore and minus) with another (in this case a space) on a specified element (in this case each A), using Jquery javascript library.

$("a").each(function() {
   $(this).html($(this).html().replace(/[_-]/g," "));
});

The first argument passed on replace is a regex, if you just pass a single character (like “_” or “-”) only first occurrence for each element.

Real world usage: I use this onto a long page, where a table has long filenames with underscore and minus in place of spaces. This trick allows in my case to show tables nicely, without caring on a mass substitution via server side scripting.

See also:

• Regex in Javascript – an useful guide
• Jquery each – to match all specified elements
• Jquery html() – read and write html content (innerHTML) of an element