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Answered

Script to remove commas and apostrophes from text layer

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
July 21, 2019
2 replies
2397 views

I'm trying to simply remove all spaces, commas and apostrophes from a text layer. I've got the spaces out with the below code, however, doing something similar for the apostrophes doesn't seem to work. Any thoughts? Thanks!

myText = myText.replace(/ |,/g, "");

myText = myText.replace(/'|,/g, "");

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Correct answer Chuck Uebele

r-bin's is close, but has issues with the apostrophes in a text layer, and I think this is due to PS using smart quotes, so you have to put in the keycode for smart quotes when doing the regular expression. This worked for me, but not sure if it will work if you copy and paste.

var doc = activeDocument
var lay = doc.activeLayer
lay.textItem.contents = lay.textItem.contents.replace(/(,|\s|'|‘|’|`)/g, "")

Chuck Uebele

Correct answer

Community Expert

r-bin's is close, but has issues with the apostrophes in a text layer, and I think this is due to PS using smart quotes, so you have to put in the keycode for smart quotes when doing the regular expression. This worked for me, but not sure if it will work if you copy and paste.

var doc = activeDocument
var lay = doc.activeLayer
lay.textItem.contents = lay.textItem.contents.replace(/(,|\s|'|‘|’|`)/g, "")

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

After r-bin's hint that apostrophe and single quotes may be the issue, I started to look for specifying the regex character via it's unicode value... However I don't even know if Adobe's regex implementation supports them.

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

On Windows, I typed in the alt code: alt-0145 and alt-0146, and that seemed to work.

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Regular expression metacharacters need to be escaped with a backslash. You should be able to use all three in a single replace:

(/\,| |\'/g, "")

or

(/\,|\s|\'/g, "")

RetsiedAuthor

Known Participant

Hmm, this didn't seem to work with replacing the apostrophe

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Apologies, I was escape happy!

Try removing the backslash escape character from the apostrophe, it is a literal character and not a metacharacter (however in a regex tester it works both ways, I did not test in a scripting environment).

(/\,| |\'/g, "")

(/\,|\s|\'/g, "")

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