title: Javascript regex question: strip special symbols and URL's
body: <p>What I need is something that will match words that contain special symbols (except ?, ! and .) and URL's.
  Here's what I already have, but it doesn't quite work.</p>
  
  <pre><code>re = new RegExp('(http://\S+|\S*[^\w\s,.":]\S*)');
  
  text = '@hello how are you? http://example.com';
  clean = text.replace(re, '');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The current output is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; 'hello how are you? http://example.com'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output should be:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; '  how are you? '
  </code></pre>