Regular Expression - Match all but first letter in each word in sentence

Question

I've almost got the answer here, but I'm missing something and I hope someone here can help me out.

I need a regular expression that will match all but the first letter in each word in a sentence. Then I need to replace the matched letters with the correct number of asterisks. For example, if I have the following sentence:

There is an enormous apple tree in my backyard.

I need to get this result:

T**** i* a* e******* a**** t*** i* m* b*******.

I have managed to come up with an expression that almost does that:

(?<=(\b[A-Za-z]))([a-z]+)

Using the example sentence above, that expression gives me:

T* i* a* e* a* t* i* m* b*.

How do I get the right number of asterisks?

Thank you.

Answer 1

you can try this

\B\w

this will replace all character except first letter ini words

from this ==Hello==World== into ==H****==W****==

Answer 2

Try this possibly:

(\w{1})\w*

Answer 3

This is an old question. Adding an answer since the others don't seem to solve this problem completely or clearly. The simplest regular expression that handles this is /(\B[a-z])/g. This adds 'g' as a global flag, so the single character search will be repeated throughout the string.

string = "There is an enormous apple tree in my backyard."
answer = string.replace(/\B[a-z]/g, "*");

string = "There is an enormous apple tree in my backyard."
$("#stringDiv").text(string);

answer = string.replace(/\B[a-z]/g, "*");
$("#answerDiv").text(answer);

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="stringDiv"></div>
<div id="answerDiv"></div>