How can I trim a specific character off the start & end of a string?

Question

How can I remove a specific character, a double-quote ( " ), appearing any number of times, from the start and end of a string?

I had a look at string.trim() , which trims any whitespace characters, but it's not possible to provide an optional argument with " as the needle to search for.

Answer 1

You can use RegEx to easily conquer this problem:

myString = myString.replace(/^"+|"+$/g, '');

You can substitute the " with any character (be careful, some characters need to be escaped ).

Here's a demo on JSFiddle .

---

An explanation of the regular expression:

/ - start RegEx ( / )

^"+ - match the start of the line ( ^ ) followed by a quote ( " ) 1 or more times ( + )

| - or

"+$ - match a quote ( " ) 1 or more times ( + ) followed by the end of the line ( $ )

/ - end RegEx ( / )

g - "global" match, ie replace all