Why doesn't this javascript regexp code work? According to the documentation it should:
Here's my String for parsing (it's the rails nested form information):
flex_table[flex_rows_attributes][0][flex_cells_attributes][0][id]
What I want are these sections, which may or may not be part of the string:
flex_rows_attributes, 0, flex_cells_attributes, 0
Here's my regular expression(as I mentioned, the javascript flavour):
flex_table((\[(\w+)\]\[(\d+)\])*)
I only get back the last of the two entries, but I want them both.
Does anyone know, what I am missing here?
^(?!flex_table\b).*$|(\[(\w+)\]\[(\d+)\])
Try this.Grab the captures.See demo.
http://regex101.com/r/hQ9xT1/26
Related
I am surprised to not to find any post regarding this, I must be missing something very trivial. I have a small JavaScript function to check if a string matches an object's properties. Simple stuff right? It works easily with all strings except those which contain a forward slash.
"04/08/2015".indexOf('4') // returns 2 :good
"04/08/2015".indexOf('4/') // returns -1 :why?
The same issue appears to be with .search() function as well. I encountered this issue while working on date strings.
Please note that I don't want to use regex based solution for performance reasons. Thanks for your help in advance!
Your string has invisible Unicode characters in it. The "left-to-right mark" (hex 200E) appears around the two slash characters as well as at the beginning and the end of the string.
If you type the code in on your browser console instead of cutting and pasting, you'll see that it works as expected.
While writing an API service for my site, I realized that String.split() won't do it much longer, and decided to try my luck with regular expressions. I have almost done it but I can't find the last bit. Here is what I want to do:
The URL represents a function call:
/api/SECTION/FUNCTION/[PARAMS]
This last part, including the slash, is optional. Some functions display a JSON reply without having to receive any arguments. Example: /api/sounds/getAllSoundpacks prints a list of available sound packs. Though, /api/sounds/getPack/8Bit prints the detailed information.
Here is the expression I have tried:
req.url.match(/\/(.*)\/(.*)\/?(.*)/);
What am I missing to make the last part optional - or capture it in whole?
This will capture everything after FUNCTION/ in your URL, independent of the appearance of any further / after FUNCTION/:
FUNCTION\/(.+)$
The RegExp will not match if there is no part after FUNCTION.
This regex should work by making last slash and part after optional:
/^\/[^/]*\/[^/]*(?:\/.*)?$/
This matches all of these strings:
/api/SECTION/FUNCTION/abc
/api/SECTION
/api/SECTION/
/api/SECTION/FUNCTION
Your pattern /(.*)/(.*)/?(.*) was almost correct, it's just a bit too short - it allows 2 or 3 slashes, but you want to accept anything with 3 or 4 slashes. And if you want to capture the last (optional) slash AND any text behind it as a whole, you simply need to create a group around that section and make it optional:
/.*/.*/.*(?:/.+)?
should do the trick.
Demo. (The pattern looks different because multiline mode is enabled, but it still works. It's also a little "better" because it won't match garbage like "///".)
I want to know how can I get a regular expression for matching number, ., and - only.
I am using this:
/^[0-9\.'S]+$/
by this it working fine but not working for symbol "-".
You simply haven't used the literal dash - (or minus) in the regex. Try:
/^[0-9\.-]+$/
But if you want a proper number, you might want to use a more proper regex:
/^-?[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?$/
The first regex can accept things such as 3987----.... while the second will not accept it, but will accept things like -87.983274.
That's because - is not part of your character class. You are only using - in the class range (which only includes digits). Also, I don't know what the S and the ' are doing there:
/^[0-9.-]+$/
Also, I can promise you that after taking the time to read through this tutorial regular expressions will seem a lot less confusing to you.
Try the below regex.
/^-?[0-9\.]+$/
I am hoping that this will have a pretty quick and simple answer. I am using regular-expressions.info to help me get the right regular expression to turn URL-encoded, ISO-8859-1 pound sign ("%A3"), into a URL-encoded UTF-8 pound sign ("%C2%A3").
In other words I just want to swap %A3 with %C2%A3, when the %A3 is not already prefixed with %C2.
So I would have thought the following would work:
Regular Expression: (?!(\%C2))\%A3
Replace With: %C2%A3
But it doesn't and I can't figure out why!
I assume my syntax is just slightly wrong, but I can't figure it out! Any ideas?
FYI - I know that the following will work (and have used this as a workaround in the meantime), but really want to understand why the former doesn't work.
Regular Expression: ([^\%C2])\%A3
Replace With: $1%C2%A3
TIA!
Why not just replace ((%C2)?%A3) with %C2%A3, making the prefix an optional part of the match? It means that you're "replacing" text with itself even when it's already right, but I don't foresee a performance issue.
Unfortunately, the (?!) syntax is negative lookahead. To the best of my knowledge, JavaScript does not support negative lookbehind.
What you could do is go forward with the replacement anyway, and end up with %C2%C2%A3 strings, but these could easily be converted in a second pass to the desired %C2%A3.
You could replace
(^.?.?|(?!%C2)...)%A3
with
$1%C2%A3
I would suggest you use the functional form of Javascript String.replace (see the section "Specifying a function as a parameter"). This lets you put arbitrary logic, including state if necessary, into a regexp-matching session. For your case, I'd use a simpler regexp that matches a superset of what you want, then in the function call you can test whether it meets your exact criteria, and if it doesn't then just return the matched string as is.
The only problem with this approach is that if you have overlapping potential matches, you have the possibility of missing the second match, since there's no way to return a value to tell the replace() method that it isn't really a match after all.
I am trying to write some JavaScript RegEx to replace user inputed tags with real html tags, so [b] will become <b> and so forth. the RegEx I am using looks like so
var exptags = /\[(b|u|i|s|center|code){1}]((.){1,}?)\[\/(\1){1}]/ig;
with the following JavaScript
s.replace(exptags,"<$1>$2</$1>");
this works fine for single nested tags, for example:
[b]hello[/b] [u]world[/u]
but if the tags are nested inside each other it will only match the outer tags, for example
[b]foo [u]to the[/u] bar[/b]
this will only match the b tags. how can I fix this? should i just loop until the starting string is the same as the outcome? I have a feeling that the ((.){1,}?) patten is wrong also?
Thanks
The easiest solution would be to to replace all the tags, whether they are closed or not and let .innerHTML work out if they are matched or not it will much more resilient that way..
var tagreg = /\[(\/?)(b|u|i|s|center|code)]/ig
div.innerHTML="[b][i]helloworld[/b]".replace(tagreg, "<$1$2>") //no closing i
//div.inerHTML=="<b><i>helloworld</i></b>"
AFAIK you can't express recursion with regular expressions.
You can however do that with .NET's System.Text.RegularExpressions using balanced matching. See more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2005/03/15/396452.aspx
If you're using .NET you can probably implement what you need with a callback.
If not, you may have to roll your own little javascript parser.
Then again, if you can afford to hit the server you can use the full parser. :)
What do you need this for, anyway? If it is for anything other than a preview I highly recommend doing the processing server-side.
You could just repeatedly apply the regexp until it no longer matches. That would do odd things like "[b][b]foo[/b][/b]" => "<b>[b]foo</b>[/b]" => "<b><b>foo</b></b>", but as far as I can see the end result will still be a sensible string with matching (though not necessarily properly nested) tags.
Or if you want to do it 'right', just write a simple recursive descent parser. Though people might expect "[b]foo[u]bar[/b]baz[/u]" to work, which is tricky to recognise with a parser.
The reason the nested block doesn't get replaced is because the match, for [b], places the position after [/b]. Thus, everything that ((.){1,}?) matches is then ignored.
It is possible to write a recursive parser in server-side -- Perl uses qr// and Ruby probably has something similar.
Though, you don't necessarily need true recursive. You can use a relatively simple loop to handle the string equivalently:
var s = '[b]hello[/b] [u]world[/u] [b]foo [u]to the[/u] bar[/b]';
var exptags = /\[(b|u|i|s|center|code){1}]((.){1,}?)\[\/(\1){1}]/ig;
while (s.match(exptags)) {
s = s.replace(exptags, "<$1>$2</$1>");
}
document.writeln('<div>' + s + '</div>'); // after
In this case, it'll make 2 passes:
0: [b]hello[/b] [u]world[/u] [b]foo [u]to the[/u] bar[/b]
1: <b>hello</b> <u>world</u> <b>foo [u]to the[/u] bar</b>
2: <b>hello</b> <u>world</u> <b>foo <u>to the</u> bar</b>
Also, a few suggestions for cleaning up the RegEx:
var exptags = /\[(b|u|i|s|center|code)\](.+?)\[\/(\1)\]/ig;
{1} is assumed when no other count specifiers exist
{1,} can be shortened to +
Agree with Richard Szalay, but his regex didn't get quoted right:
var exptags = /\[(b|u|i|s|center|code)](.*)\[\/\1]/ig;
is cleaner. Note that I also change .+? to .*. There are two problems with .+?:
you won't match [u][/u], since there isn't at least one character between them (+)
a non-greedy match won't deal as nicely with the same tag nested inside itself (?)
Yes, you will have to loop. Alternatively since your tags looks so much like HTML ones you could replace [b] for <b> and [/b] for </b> separately. (.){1,}? is the same as (.*?) - that is, any symbols, least possible sequence length.
Updated: Thanks to MrP, (.){1,}? is (.)+?, my bad.
How about:
tagreg=/\[(.?)?(b|u|i|s|center|code)\]/gi;
"[b][i]helloworld[/i][/b]".replace(tagreg, "<$1$2>");
"[b]helloworld[/b]".replace(tagreg, "<$1$2>");
For me the above produces:
<b><i>helloworld</i></b>
<b>helloworld</b>
This appears to do what you want, and has the advantage of needing only a single pass.
Disclaimer: I don't code often in JS, so if I made any mistakes please feel free to point them out :-)
You are right about the inner pattern being troublesome.
((.){1,}?)
That is doing a captured match at least once and then the whole thing is captured. Every character inside your tag will be captured as a group.
You are also capturing your closing element name when you don't need it and are using {1} when that is implied. Below is a cleanup up version:
/\[(b|u|i|s|center|code)](.+?)\[\/\1]/ig
Not sure about the other problem.