JavaScript String replaceAll

By  on  

Replacing a substring of text within a larger string has always been misleading in JavaScript. I wrote Replace All Occurrences of a String in JavaScript years ago and it's still one of my most read articles.

The confusion lies in that replace only replaces the first occurrence of a substring, not all occurrences. For example:

'yayayayayaya'.replace('ya', 'na');
// nayayayayaya

To replace all instances of a substring, you've needed to use a regular expression:

'yayayayayaya'.replace(/ya/g, 'na');
// nananananana

Using regular expressions is certainly powerful but let's be honest -- oftentimes we simply want to replace all instances of a simple substring that shouldn't require a regular expression.

Luckily, this year the JavaScript language provided us with String.prototype.replaceAll, a method for replacing without using regular expressions:

'yayayayayaya'.replaceAll('ya', 'na');
// nananananana

Sometimes an API exists in a confusing format and standards bodies simply need to improve the situation. I'm glad they did so with replaceAll!

Recent Features

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!