Remove all special characters with RegExp

Note that if you still want to exclude a set, including things like slashes and special characters you can do the following:

var outString = sourceString.replace(/[`~!@#$%^&*()_|+\-=?;:'",.<>\{\}\[\]\\\/]/gi, '');

take special note that in order to also include the "minus" character, you need to escape it with a backslash like the latter group. if you don't it will also select 0-9 which is probably undesired.

var desired = stringToReplace.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '')

As was mentioned in the comments it's easier to do this as a whitelist - replace the characters which aren't in your safelist.

The caret (^) character is the negation of the set [...], gi say global and case-insensitive (the latter is a bit redundant but I wanted to mention it) and the safelist in this example is digits, word characters, underscores (\w) and whitespace (\s).

Plain Javascript regex does not handle Unicode letters.

Do not use [^\w\s], this will remove letters with accents (like àèéìòù), not to mention to Cyrillic or Chinese, letters coming from such languages will be completed removed.

You really don't want remove these letters together with all the special characters. You have two chances:

• Add in your regex all the special characters you don't want remove,
  for example: [^èéòàùì\w\s].
• Have a look at xregexp.com. XRegExp adds base support for Unicode matching via the \p{...} syntax.

var str = "Їжак::: résd,$%& adùf"
var search = XRegExp('([^?<first>\\pL ]+)');
var res = XRegExp.replace(str, search, '',"all");

console.log(res); // returns "Їжак::: resd,adf"
console.log(str.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '') ); // returns " rsd adf"
console.log(str.replace(/[^\wèéòàùì\s]/gi, '') ); // returns " résd adùf"

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/xregexp/3.1.1/xregexp-all.js"></script>