How Do I Remove a text Parenthesis Using JQuery?

Question

I have some auto-generated text that includes non-ascii encoded parentheses. For example:

<div> Some text (these are the non-ascii encoded parenthesis).
<div>

I want to get rid of the parenthesis. I have the following, which I use elsewhere to clean out some html elements, but I can't get similar to work to remove actual text:

     jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery(".block").find("p").remove()});

I've found a few ideas around, but they deal with normal text. Getting rid of a parenthesis is a challenge, as I'm not sure how to code the parenthesis so that jQuery understands it.

Any ideas?

Solution

You should do the replacing/cleaning with vanilla Javascript. Something like

$('div').text(function(_, text) {
    return text.replace(/\(|\)/g, '');
});

will do it. Notice, this would query for all <div> nodes on the entire side, you want to be more specific on the selector.

demo: http://jsfiddle.net/2gHh2/

If you'd like to remove the parenthesis and everything in between, you'd simply have to change the regular expression to /\(.*?\)/g.

Comments

[user624385]

That works great if the entire div is text, but the div has other elements in it. These are getting obliterated. For example, on your fiddle site, add an <a> element inside the div... it gets ignored, by which I mean it does not get interpreted by the browser and shown as a link.

[jAndy]

@user624385: I've updated the jsfiddle. See jsfiddle.net/2gHh2/2. That should do the job generically for any childnodes within a parentnode too.

[user624385]

Yes! Your answer at jsfiddle.net/2gHh2/2 is perfect! Thank you very much, sir! I've paypal'd you $5 for a coffee. Much obliged.

[jAndy]

@user624385: oh nice, thanks dude. (I'm dreaming of every answer got rewarded by 5 bucks.... hehe)

[ggomersall]

the removal of bits between the parenthesis helped a ton as well! thanks jAndy :)