regex - How to replace all characters in a string except first and last characters, using JavaScript

Question

I need to write a solution in JavaScript to replace all the characters in a string with a *, except for the first and last characters. I'm not very familiar with RegEx but was trying to use the following to achieve the solution:

var regex = /.(?=^)(?!=$)/;
    const censored = w.replace(regex)
    console.log(censored)

Any ideas on how I can achieve this?

Answer 1

The idea of using lookaheads is viable, let's correct a few mistakes:

var regex = /(?<!^).(?!$)/g;
var w = 'fork'
var censored = w.replace(regex, '*')

console.log(censored)