Regular rxpression to convert a camel case string into kebab case

Question

function hyphenate(str) {

  var replace = "-";
  str = str.toLowerCase().replace(/[\s_\b]/g, replace);

  console.log(str);
  return str;
}

hyphenate("This Is Hyphenate"); // this-is-hyphenate
hyphenate("camelCaseString");   // camel-case-string

I am trying to get my code to produce the results of the second function call, but have not identified a pattern that can do this. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Note that \b in your [\s_\b] means a backspace character. Not sure you really need this.

Updated answer using the lookbehind feature introduced in ECMAScript 2018:

const re = /[\W_]+|(?<=[a-z0-9])(?=[A-Z])/g;
const strs = ['camelCaseString','This      Is Hyphenate','This_Should_Hyphenate', '09Report'];
strs.forEach(str => 
  console.log( str.replace(re, "-").toLowerCase() )
);

The [\W_]+|(?<=[a-z0-9])(?=[A-Z]) regex will match

• [\W_]+ - any 1+ non-word and _ chars
• | - or
• (?<=[a-z0-9])(?=[A-Z]) - a location between a lowercase ASCII letter/digit and an uppercase ASCII letter.

Old answer

I'd use a bit different logic: add a hyphen before each capital letter inside a word, and then replace and turn lowercase:

var re = /[\s_]+|([a-z0-9])(?=[A-Z])/g; 
var str = 'camelCaseString<br/>This      Is Hyphenate<br/>This_Should_Hyphenate';
var result = str.replace(re, "$1-").toLowerCase();
document.body.innerHTML += result;

Explanation:

• [\s_]+ - one or more whitespaces or underscores
• | - or...
• ([a-z0-9]) - (Group 1) a lowercase letter or digit (since \B would not let us match an uppercase letter after _, add A-Z if you want to add - before each uppercase letter)
• (?=[A-Z]) - a test for an uppercase ASCII letter (that is not consumed since it (?=[A-Z]) is a lookahead, a zero width assertion).