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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Reverse Element Order with CSS Flexbox

    CSS is becoming more and more powerful these days, almost to the point where the order of HTML elements output to the page no longer matters from a display standpoint -- CSS lets you do so much that almost any layout, large or small, is possible.  Semantics...

  • By
    CSS Triangles

    I was recently redesigning my website and wanted to create tooltips.  Making that was easy but I also wanted my tooltips to feature the a triangular pointer.  I'm a disaster when it comes to images and the prospect of needing to make an image for...

Discussion

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