That's also problematic. If w includes characters that have special meaning in a regex (e.g. a period), this will cause issues. You could try to escape those s

That's also problematic. If w includes characters that have special meaning in a regex (e.g. a period), this will cause issues. You could try to escape those special characters but that is potentially error prone. For an arbitrary w, one approach is something kind of awful like: let s2 = s1; while (s2.includes(w)) { s2 = s2.replace(w, '') } Edit: minitech's solution is better.