Trim specific character from a string

by

One line is enough:

var x = '|f|oo||';
var y = x.replace(/^\|+|\|+$/g, '');
document.write(x + '<br />' + y);
^     beginning of the string
\|+   pipe, one or more times
|     or
\|+   pipe, one or more times
$     end of the string

A general solution:

function trim (s, c) {
  if (c === "]") c = "\\]";
  if (c === "^") c = "\\^";
  if (c === "\\") c = "\\\\";
  return s.replace(new RegExp(
    "^[" + c + "]+|[" + c + "]+$", "g"
  ), "");
}

chars = ".|]\\^";
for (c of chars) {
  s = c + "foo" + c + c + "oo" + c + c + c;
  console.log(s, "->", trim(s, c));
}

Parameter c is expected to be a character (a string of length 1).

As mentionned in the comments, it might be useful to support multiple characters, as it’s quite common to trim multiple whitespace-like characters for example. To do this, MightyPork suggests to replace the ifs with the following line of code:

c = c.replace(/[-/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&');

This part [-/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}] is a set of special characters in regular expression syntax, and $& is a placeholder which stands for the matching character, meaning that the replace function escapes special characters. Try in your browser console:

> "{[hello]}".replace(/[-/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&')
"\{\[hello\]\}"

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