How to change "&" to & for twitter javascript program

Question

I am relatively new to the developer community, and I am having trouble dealing with the & character when dealing with text.

To be specific, my twitterbot program stores the words of a tweet into an array, rearranges the array in alphabetical order, and posts the new alphabetized tweet text. I run into issues dealing with tweets that contain an ampersand. For example, let's say a tweet says "T & P". It will store an ampersand as:

['T', '&', 'P']

Therefore, when my program alphabetizes and posts a tweet, it will post: & P T

Basically, I just want to know how to display the ampersand as '&' in twitter, instead of &.

Currently, I have been trying this:

for (i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {

        tweetTxt = data[i].text;


        if(tweetTxt.includes('&amp;')) {
        console.log("\nThis tweet reads: " + tweetTxt);
        tweetTxt.replace(/&amp;/g, '&');
        console.log("\n" + tweetTxt);

        }

What am I missing? How do I store an ampersand as '&' instead of & so that way the posted tweet will show a true ampersand.

Answer 1

When you call .replace() on a string, it creates a new string with the modifications and returns it in that statement. It doesn't modify the string that you called it on.

So you have to re-set the string to the result of the tweetTxt.replace() statement.

for (i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
    tweetTxt = data[i].text;

    if(tweetTxt.includes('&amp;')) {
        console.log("\nThis tweet reads: " + tweetTxt);
        tweetTxt = tweetTxt.replace(/&amp;/g, '&');
        console.log("\n" + tweetTxt);
    }
}