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replacing special characters with a specific special character

I have a string which is exactly like this...
R%26B,Alternative,Rock,Classic Rock,Heavy Metal,Classical,Reggae%2fSka,
I have tried enough to remove the special characters before they reach the browser...but not going anywhere..so planing to rely on my old and trusted friend "javascript" I want it to read
R&B,Alternative,Rock,Classic Rock,Heavy Metal,Classical,Reggae&Ska,
I know this can be done through regular expression which I am just not able to figure it out. How would I write the expression?
Any help would be highly appreciated

You may try using:
decodeURIComponent("R%26B,Alternative,Rock,Classic Rock,Heavy Metal,Classical,Reggae%26Ska")
//^prints^ "R&B,Alternative,Rock,Classic Rock,Heavy Metal,Classical,Reggae&Ska"

Look at these answers:
Regex to remove all special characters from string?
They layout a regex that will remove everything EXCEPT those characters you want to allow, this is safer then removing a list of %26,%2f, etc.
For example...
[^0-9a-zA-Z, ]+ would allow all letters, numbers, commas and whitespace.
[^0-9a-zA-Z]+ would be only letters and numbers
The other answers are probably pointing you in a better direction... if it means fixing the string before it gets to the client.

Probably you need decodeURIComponent() function.
<script>
var decodedString = decodeURIComponent('R%26B,Alternative,Rock,Classic Rock,Heavy Metal,Classical,Reggae%2fSka');
</script>
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_decodeuricomponent.asp

Regex wordwrap with UTF8 characters in JS

i've already read all tha articles in here wich touch a similar problem but still don't get any solution working. In my case i wanna wrap each word of a string with a span. The words contain special characters like 'äüö...'
What i am doing at the moment is:
var textWrap = text.replace(/\b([a-zA-Z0-9ßÄÖÜäöüÑñÉéÈèÁáÀàÂâŶĈĉĜĝŷÊêÔôÛûŴŵ-]+)\b/g, "<span>$1</span>");
But what happens is that if the äüñ or whatever NON-Ascii character is at the end or at the beginning it also acts like a boundary. Being within a word these characters do't act as a boundary.
'Ärmelkanal' becomes Ä<span>rmelkanal</span> but should be <span>Ärmelkanal</span>
'Käse'works fine... becomes <span>Käse</span>
'diré' becomes <span>dir</span>é but should be <span>diré</span>
Any advice would be very appreciated. I need to do that on clientside :-( BTW did i mention that i hate regular expressions ;-)
Thank You very much!

The problem is that JavaScript recognizes word boundaries only before/after ASCII letters (and numbers/underscore). Just drop the \b anchors and it should work.
result = subject.replace(/[a-zA-Z0-9ßÄÖÜäöüÑñÉéÈèÁáÀàÂâŶĈĉĜĝŷÊêÔôÛûŴŵ-]+/g, "<span>$&</span>");

JavaScript/jQuery removing character 160 from a node's text() value - Regex

$('#customerAddress').text().replace(/\xA0/,"").replace(/\s+/," ");
Going after the value in a span (id=customerAddress) and I'd like to reduce all sections of whitespace to a single whitespace. The /\s+/ whould work except this app gets some character 160's between street address and state/zip
What is a better way to write this? this does not currently work.
UPDATE:
I have figured out that
$('.customerAddress').text().replace(/\s+/g," ");
clears the 160s and the spaces.
But how would I write a regex to just go after the 160s?
$('.customerAddress').text().replace(String.fromCharCode(160)," ");
didn't even work.
Note: I'm testing in Firefox / Firebug

Regarding just replacing char 160, you forgot to make a global regex, so you are only replacing the first match. Try this:
$('.customerAddress').text()
.replace(new RegExp(String.fromCharCode(160),"g")," ");
Or even simpler, use your Hex example in your question with the global flag
$('.customerAddress').text().replace(/\xA0/g," ");

\s does already contain the character U+00A0:
[\t\n\v\f\r \u00a0\u2000\u2001\u2002\u2003\u2004\u2005\u2006\u2007\u2008\u2009\u200a\u200b\u2028\u2029\u3000]
But you should add the g modifier to replace globally:
$('#customerAddress').text().replace(/\s+/g, " ")
Otherwise only the first match will be replaced.

Sorry if I'm being obvious (or wrong), but doesn't .text() when called w/o parameters just RETURNS the text? I mean, I don't know if you included the full code or just an excerpt, but to really replace the span you should do it like:
var t = $('#customerAddress').text().replace(/\xA0/,"").replace(/\s+/," ");
$('#customerAddress').text(t);
Other than that, the regex for collapsing the spaces seems OK, I'm just not sure about the syntax of your non-printable char there.

Regex to match part of a string

Regex fun again...
Take for example http://something.com/en/page
I want to test for an exact match on /en/ including the forward slashes, otherwise it could match 'en' from other parts of the string.
I'm sure this is easy, for someone other than me!
EDIT:
I'm using it for a string.match() in javascript

Well it really depends on what programming language will be executing the regex, but the actual regex is simply
/en/
For .Net the following code works properly:
string url = "http://something.com/en/page";
bool MatchFound = Regex.Match(url, "/en/").Success;
Here is the JavaScript version:
var url = 'http://something.com/en/page';
if (url.match(/\/en\//)) {
alert('match found');
}
else {
alert('no match');
}
DUH
Thank you to Welbog and Chris Ballance to making what should have been the most obvious point. This does not require Regular Expressions to solve. It simply is a contains statement. Regex should only be used where it is needed and that should have been my first consideration and not the last.

If you're trying to match /en/ specifically, you don't need a regular expression at all. Just use your language's equivalent of contains to test for that substring.
If you're trying to match any two-letter part of the URL between two slashes, you need an expression like this:
/../
If you want to capture the two-letter code, enclose the periods in parentheses:
/(..)/
Depending on your language, you may need to escape the slashes:
\/..\/
\/(..)\/
And if you want to make sure you match letters instead of any character (including numbers and symbols), you might want to use an expression like this instead:
/[a-z]{2}/
Which will be recognized by most regex variations.
Again, you can escape the slashes and add a capturing group this way:
\/([a-z]{2})\/
And if you don't need to escape them:
/([a-z]{2})/
This expression will match any string in the form /xy/ where x and y are letters. So it will match /en/, /fr/, /de/, etc.
In JavaScript, you'll need the escaped version: \/([a-z]{2})\/.

You may need to escape the forward-slashes...
/\/en\//

Any reason /en/ would not work?

/\/en\// or perhaps /http\w*:\/\/[^\/]*\/en\//

You don't need a regex for this:
location.pathname.substr(0, 4) === "/en/"
Of course, if you insist on using a regex, use this:
/^\/en\//.test(location.pathname)

Javascript regular expression to strip out content between double quotes

I'm looking for a javascript regex that will remove all content wrapped in quotes(and the qoutes too), in a string that is the outlook format for listing email addresses. Take a look at the sample below, I am a regex tard and really need some help with this one, any help/resources would be appreciated!
"Bill'sRestauraunt"BillsRestauraunt#comcast.net,"Rob&Julie"robjules#ntelos.net,"Foo&Bar"foobar#cstone.net

Assuming no nested quotes:
mystring.replace(/"[^"]*"/g, '')

Try this regular expression:
/(?:"(?:[^"\\]+|\\(?:\\\\)*.)*"|'(?:[^'\\]+|\\(?:\\\\)*.)*')/g

Here's a regex I use to find and decompose the quoted strings within a paragraph. It also isolates several attendant tokens, especially adjacent whitespace. You can string together whichever parts you want.
var re = new RegExp(/([^\s\(]?)"(\s*)([^\\]*?(\\.[^\\]*)*)(\s*)("|\n\n)([^\s\)\.\,;]?)/g);