Trimming other characters than whitespace? (trim() for variable characters)

Question

Is there an easy way to replace characters at the beginning and end of a string, but not in the middle? I need to trim off dashes. I know trim() exists, but it only trims whitespace.

Here's my use case:

Input:

university-education
-test
football-coach
wine-

Output:

university-education
test
football-coach
wine

Answer 1

You can use String#replace with a regular expression.

^-*|-*$

Explanation:

^ - start of the string
-* matches a dash zero or more times
| - or
-* - matches a dash zero or more times
$ - end of the string

function trimDashes(str){
  return str.replace(/^-*|-*$/g, '');
}
console.log(trimDashes('university-education'));
console.log(trimDashes('-test'));
console.log(trimDashes('football-coach'));
console.log(trimDashes('--wine----'));