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How to write regexp for finding :smile: in javascript?

I want to write a regular expression, in JavaScript, for finding the string starting and ending with :.
For example "hello :smile: :sleeping:" from this string I need to find the strings which are starting and ending with the : characters. I tried the expression below, but it didn't work:
^:.*\:$

My guess is that you not only want to find the string, but also replace it. For that you should look at using a capture in the regexp combined with a replacement function.
const emojiPattern = /:(\w+):/g
function replaceEmojiTags(text) {
return text.replace(emojiPattern, function (tag, emotion) {
// The emotion will be the captured word between your tags,
// so either "sleep" or "sleeping" in your example
//
// In this function you would take that emotion and return
// whatever you want based on the input parameter and the
// whole tag would be replaced
//
// As an example, let's say you had a bunch of GIF images
// for the different emotions:
return '<img src="/img/emoji/' + emotion + '.gif" />';
});
}
With that code you could then run your function on any input string and replace the tags to get the HTML for the actual images in them. As in your example:
replaceEmojiTags('hello :smile: :sleeping:')
// 'hello <img src="/img/emoji/smile.gif" /> <img src="/img/emoji/sleeping.gif" />'
EDIT: To support hyphens within the emotion, as in "big-smile", the pattern needs to be changed since it is only looking for word characters. For this there is probably also a restriction such that the hyphen must join two words so that it shouldn't accept "-big-smile" or "big-smile-". For that you need to change the pattern to:
const emojiPattern = /:(\w+(-\w+)*):/g
That pattern is looking for any word that is then followed by zero or more instances of a hyphen followed by a word. It would match any of the following: "smile", "big-smile", "big-smile-bigger".

The ^ and $ are anchors (start and end respectively). These cause your regex to explicitly match an entire string which starts with : has anything between it and ends with :.
If you want to match characters within a string you can remove the anchors.
Your * indicates zero or more so you'll be matching :: as well. It'll be better to change this to + which means one or more. In fact if you're just looking for text you may want to use a range [a-z0-9] with a case insensitive modifier.
If we put it all together we'll have regex like this /:([a-z0-9]+):/gmi
match a string beginning with : with any alphanumeric character one or more times ending in : with the modifiers g globally, m multi-line and i case insensitive for things like :FacePalm:.
Using it in JavaScript we can end up with:
var mytext = 'Hello :smile: and jolly :wave:';
var matches = mytext.match(/:([a-z0-9]+):/gmi);
// matches = [':smile:', ':wave:'];
You'll have an array with each match found.

I need some help for a specific regex in javascript

I try to set a correct regex in my javascript code, but I'm a bit confused with this. My goal is to find any occurence of "rotate" in a string. This should be simple, but in fact I'm lost as my "rotate" can have multiple endings! Here are some examples of what I want to find with the regex:
rotate5
rotate180
rotate-1
rotate-270
The "rotate" word can be at the begining of my string or at the end, or even in the middle separated by spaces from other words. The regex will be used in a search-and-replace function.
Can someone help me please?
EDIT: What I tried so far (probably missing some of them):
/\wrotate.*/
/rotate.\w*/
/rotate.\d/
/\Srotate*/
I'm not fully understanding the regex mechanic yet.

Try this regex as a start. It will return all occurrences of a "rotate" string where a number (positive or negative) follows the "rotate".
/(rotate)([-]?[0-9]*)/g
Here is sample code
var aString = ["rotate5","rotate180","rotate-1","some text rotate-270 rotate-1 more text rotate180"];
for (var x = 0; x < 4; x++){
var match;
var regex = /(rotate)([-]?[0-9]*)/g;
while (match = regex.exec(aString[x])){
console.log(match);
}
}
In this example,
match[0] gives the whole match (e.g. rotate5)
match[1] gives the text "rotate"
match[2] gives the numerical text immediately after the word "rotate"
If there are multiple rotate stings in the string, this will return them all

If you just need to know if the 'word' is in the string so /rotate/ simply will be OK.
But if you want some matching about what coming before or after the #mseifert will be good
If you just want to replace the word rotate by another one
you can just use the string method String.replace use it like var str = "i am rotating with rotate-90"; str.repalace('rotate','turning')'
WHy your regex doesnt work ?
/\wrotate.*/
means that the string must start with a caracter [a-zA-Z0-9_] followed by rotate and another optional character
/rotate.\w*/
meanse rotate must be followed by a character and others n optional character
...............

Using your description:
The "rotate" word can be at the beginning of my string or at the end, or even in the middle separated by spaces from other words. The regex will be used in a search-and-replace function.
This regex should do the work:
const regex = /(^rotate|rotate$|\ {1}rotate\ {1})/gm;
You can learn more about regular expressions with these sites:
http://www.regular-expressions.info
regex101.com and btw here is an example using your requirements.

javascript url-safe filename-safe string

Looking for a regex/replace function to take a user inputted string say, "John Smith's Cool Page" and return a filename/url safe string like "john_smith_s_cool_page.html", or something to that extent.

Well, here's one that replaces anything that's not a letter or a number, and makes it all lower case, like your example.
var s = "John Smith's Cool Page";
var filename = s.replace(/[^a-z0-9]/gi, '_').toLowerCase();
Explanation:
The regular expression is /[^a-z0-9]/gi. Well, actually the gi at the end is just a set of options that are used when the expression is used.
i means "ignore upper/lower case differences"
g means "global", which really means that every match should be replaced, not just the first one.
So what we're looking as is really just [^a-z0-9]. Let's read it step-by-step:
The [ and ] define a "character class", which is a list of single-characters. If you'd write [one], then that would match either 'o' or 'n' or 'e'.
However, there's a ^ at the start of the list of characters. That means it should match only characters not in the list.
Finally, the list of characters is a-z0-9. Read this as "a through z and 0 through 9". It's a short way of writing abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789.
So basically, what the regular expression says is: "Find every letter that is not between 'a' and 'z' or between '0' and '9'".

I know the original poster asked for a simple Regular Expression, however, there is more involved in sanitizing filenames, including filename length, reserved filenames, and, of course reserved characters.
Take a look at the code in node-sanitize-filename for a more robust solution.

For more flexible and robust handling of unicode characters etc, you could use the slugify in conjunction with some regex to remove unsafe URL characters
const urlSafeFilename = slugify(filename, { remove: /"<>#%\{\}\|\\\^~\[\]`;\?:#=&/g });
This produces nice kebab-case filenemas in your url and allows for more characters outside the a-z0-9 range.

Here's what I did. It works to convert full sentences into a decently clean URL.
First it trims the string, then it converts spaces to dashes (-), then it gets rid of anything that's not a letter/number/dash
function slugify(title) {
return title
.trim()
.replace(/ +/g, '-')
.toLowerCase()
.replace(/[^a-z0-9-]/g, '')
}
slug.value = slugify(text.value);
text.oninput = () => { slug.value = slugify(text.value); };
<input id="text" value="Foo: the old #Foobîdoo!! " style="font-size:1.2em">
<input id="slug" readonly style="font-size:1.2em">

I think your requirement is to replaces white spaces and aphostophy `s with _ and append the .html at the end try to find such regex.
refer
http://www.regular-expressions.info/javascriptexample.html

How to make this simple regexp?

I need to make a string starts and ends with alphanumeric range between 5 to 20 characters and it could have a space or none between characters. /^[a-z\s?A-Z0-9]{5,20}$/ but this is not working.
EDIT
test test -should pass
testtest -should pass
test test test -should not pass

You can't do this with traditional regex without writing a ridiculously long expression, so you need to use a look-ahead:
/^(?=(\w| ){15,20}$)\w+ ?\w+$/
This says, make sure there are between 15 and 20 characters in the match, then match /\w+ \w+/
Note I used \w for simplification. It is the same as your character class above except it also accepts underscores. If you don't want to match them you have to do:
/^(?=[a-zA-Z0-9 ]{15,20}$)[a-zA-Z0-9]+ ?[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/

You can't put a ? inside of [...]. [...] is used to specify a set of characters precisely, you can't maybe (?) have a character inside a set of characters. The occurrence of any specific characters is already optional, the ? is meaningless.
If you allow any number of spaces inside your match, just remove the question mark. If you want to allow a single space but no more, then regular expressions alone can't do that for you, you'd need something like
if (myString.match(/^[a-z\sA-Z0-9]{5,20}$/ && myString.match(/\s/g).length <= 1)
You couldn't do this with a single traditional regex without it being dozens of lines long; regexes are meant for matching more simpler patterns than this.
If you only want to use regexes, you could use two instead of one. The first matches the general pattern, the second ensures that only one non-space characters is found.
if (myString.match(/^[a-z\sA-Z0-9]{5,20}$/ && myString.match(/^[^\s]*\s?[^\s]*$/))) {
Example Usage
inputs = ["test test", "testtest", "test test test"];
for (index in inputs) {
var myString = inputs[index];
if (myString.match(/^[a-z\sA-Z0-9]{5,20}$/ && myString.match(/^[^\s]*\s?[^\s]*$/))) {
console.log(myString + " matches.")
} else {
console.log(myString + " does not match.")
}
}
This produces the output specified in your question.

Meh , So here's the ridiculously long traditional regex for the same
(?i)[a-z0-9]+( [a-z0-9]+)?{5,12}
js vesrion (w/o the nested quantifier)
/^([a-z0-9]( [a-z0-9])?){5,12}$/i

Create a permalink with JavaScript

I have a textbox where a user puts a string like this:
"hello world! I think that __i__ am awesome (yes I am!)"
I need to create a correct URL like this:
hello-world-i-think-that-i-am-awesome-yes-i-am
How can it be done using regular expressions?
Also, is it possible to do it with Greek (for example)?
"Γεια σου κόσμε"
turns to
geia-sou-kosme
In other programming languages (Python/Ruby) I am using a translation array. Should I do the same here?

Try this:
function doDashes(str) {
var re = /[^a-z0-9]+/gi; // global and case insensitive matching of non-char/non-numeric
var re2 = /^-*|-*$/g; // get rid of any leading/trailing dashes
str = str.replace(re, '-'); // perform the 1st regexp
return str.replace(re2, '').toLowerCase(); // ..aaand the second + return lowercased result
}
console.log(doDashes("hello world! I think that __i__ am awesome (yes I am!)"));
// => hello-world-I-think-that-i-am-awesome-yes-I-am
As for the greek characters, yeah I can't think of anything else than some sort of lookup table used by another regexp.
Edit, here's the oneliner version:
Edit, added toLowerCase():
Edit, embarrassing fix to the trailing regexp:
function doDashes2(str) {
return str.replace(/[^a-z0-9]+/gi, '-').replace(/^-*|-*$/g, '').toLowerCase();
}

A simple regex for doing this job is matching all "non-word" characters, and replace them with a -. But before matching this regex, convert the string to lowercase. This alone is not fool proof, since a dash on the end may be possible.
[^a-z]+
Thus, after the replacement; you can trim the dashes (from the front and the back) using this regex:
^-+|-+$
You'd have to create greek-to-latin glyps translation yourself, regex can't help you there. Using a translation array is a good idea.

I can't really say for Greek characters, but for the first example, a simple:
/[^a-zA-Z]+/
Will do the trick when using it as your pattern, and replacing the matches with a "-"
As per the Greek characters, I'd suggest using an array with all the "character translations", and then adding it's values to the regular expression.

To roughly build the url you would need something like this.
var textbox = "hello world! I think that __i__ am awesome (yes I am!)";
var url = textbox.toLowerCase().replace(/([^a-z])/, '').replace(/\s+/, " ").replace(/\s/, '-');
It simply removes all non-alpha characters, removes double spacing, and then replaces all space chars with a dash.
You could use another regular expression to replace the greek characters with english characters.