Fastest method to replace all instances of a character in a string [duplicate]

Answer 1

I tried a number of these suggestions after realizing that an implementation I had written of this probably close to 10 years ago actually didn't work completely (nasty production bug in an long-forgotten system, isn't that always the way?!)... what I noticed is that the ones I tried (I didn't try them all) had the same problem as mine, that is, they wouldn't replace EVERY occurrence, only the first, at least for my test case of getting "test....txt" down to "test.txt" by replacing ".." with "."... maybe I missed so regex situation? But I digress...

So, I rewrote my implementation as follows. It's pretty darned simple, although I suspect not the fastest but I also don't think the difference will matter with modern JS engines, unless you're doing this inside a tight loop of course, but that's always the case for anything...

function replaceSubstring(inSource, inToReplace, inReplaceWith) {

  var outString = inSource;
  while (true) {
    var idx = outString.indexOf(inToReplace);
    if (idx == -1) {
      break;
    }
    outString = outString.substring(0, idx) + inReplaceWith +
      outString.substring(idx + inToReplace.length);
  }
  return outString;

}

Hope that helps someone!