Replacing special characters with underscore doesn't work in apex. Works in Javascript

Question

Replacing special characters with underscore in apex or trigger.I am using below things but getting error.

string groupname=(gr.name).replace(/[^A-Z0-9]+/ig, '_'); 

Error: expecting a right parentheses, found '/'

But working in javascript and java but not in apex trigger.

For testing i have used below code snippets

String abc = 'SVP, Customer Service & Support group'; 
string groupname=abc.replace('/[^A-Z0-9]+/ig', '_'); 
System.debug('value of string :::: '+groupname);

But it returned me below : SVP, Customer Service & Support group but i want to be returned like SVP_Customer_Service___Support_group

Answer 1

Java and JavaScript are completely unrelated to each other. Likewise, Apex Code is a descendant of Java, and is a complete stranger to JavaScript. Java requires patterns and such to be enclosed in a string, while JavaScript treats /.../ constructs as syntactic sugar for a more formal structure (this is closely related to how Perl performs its' regular expressions).

In Java, you set/unset flags using (?...). There is no g flag, but you can use the i flag for case insensitivity. Also, I should mention that replace() is a literal replacement, while replaceAll() is used with a regular expression. So, your code should look more like:

String groupName = gr.name.replaceAll('(?i)[^a-z0-9]', '_');

If you choose not to use the i flag, you could also have written:

[^a-zA-Z0-9]