javascript - replace dash (hyphen) with a space

This fixes it:

let str = "This-is-a-news-item-";
str = str.replace(/-/g, ' ');
alert(str);

There were two problems with your code:

1. First, String.replace() doesn’t change the string itself, it returns a changed string.
2. Second, if you pass a string to the replace function, it will only replace the first instance it encounters. That’s why I passed a regular expression with the g flag, for 'global', so that all instances will be replaced.

replace() returns an new string, and the original string is not modified. You need to do

str = str.replace(/-/g, ' ');

I think the problem you are facing is almost this: -

str = str.replace("-", ' ');

You need to re-assign the result of the replacement to str, to see the reflected change.

From MSDN Javascript reference: -

The result of the replace method is a copy of stringObj after the specified replacements have been made.

To replace all the -, you would need to use /g modifier with a regex parameter: -

str = str.replace(/-/g, ' ');