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Regex replace with multiple wildcards works in PHP, not in JavaScript

I'm attempting to implement center alignment for two Markdown parsers:
In PHP for Parsedown (successfully)
In JavaScript for Bootstrap Markdown (without success)
The idea I'm following and finding the easiest is to work with the final HTML output, and just snap inline styling onto the tags.
The following regex does what I need, it adds style="text-align:center;" to any element so far*, as needed:
$text = preg_replace('/\<(.*?)\>\->(.*?)<\-\<\/(.*?)\>/', '<$1 style="text-align:center;">$2</$3>', $text);
That is, <p>text</p> becomes <p style="text-align:center;">text</p>.
However, when I attempted to port this into JavaScript to also make it available for previewing on client-side, the pattern does not match as it should:
content = content.replace('/\<(.*?)\>\->(.*?)<\-\<\/(.*?)\>/', '<$1 style="text-align:center;">$2</$3>');
The replacement in content does not occur.
I'm aware there are slight differences between Regex of PHP and JavaScript, but I have found examples for all the expected behavior here on both sides, working.
*If someone is wondering by any chance, I'm also successfully adding the center alignment to tags that already have a style attribute - on server side only, so far.

You'll need to use the literal syntax for regular expression in JavaScript, like so:
content = content.replace(/\<(.*?)\>\->(.+)<\-\<\/(.+)\>/gi, '<$1 style="text-align:center;">$2</$3>');
Note that the gi at the end of the regular expression simply enables global searching (that is, replace all occurrences matching the pattern) and case-insensitive matching. They are both technically optional, but you will most likely want the g flag enabled for certain. However, keeping the i flag is up to you (depends on whether or not your content contains &GT;, for example).

How can I get the actual displayed text from an HTML TextNode instead of the HTML markup?

I'm trying to turn a DOM node and all its children into a plain text markup of my design. I can use node.childNodes to get a list of all the content and recursively turn it into my string format.
However, when I take text out of a TextNode, it includes newlines and spaces that aren't visible on the page. For plain text I want to get the same appearance that was on the HTML - so there shouldn't be lots of indentations before the text or newlines after it, even if they were in the HTML markup, because my browser stripped those out when it rendered the HTML.
The obvious answer would be to .trim() the string myself - except that this can take out spaces that are supposed to exist in the text, in the case of something like <em>text.</em> moretext. The latter textnode loses the space before it.
Even if that was working it's also philosophically unappealing. I want this algorithm to be based on the text presented to the user. The webpage conceals implementation details like spaces, tabs, and newlines in the underlying markup and I would like to remain within that abstraction using whatever it used to trim them down, rather than the approximation granted by trim(). Ideally there would be an equivalent of node.textContent that has a list of both plain textand child elements somehow.
I haven't been able to find anything about this and I can't see a good way to code it to be smart about those spaces (short of comparing the .textContent and .nodeValue strings or parsing innerHTML myself or something). Help?

document.getElementById("someid").innerText.replace(/\s+/g," ")
The trim method removes the space at the head and the end of a string, but not in the middle

I have written an implementation of exactly this as part of my Rangy library's TextRange module, but it's a lot of code to include for just this.
var displayedText = rangy.innerText(node);

How to adding special html chars without using innerHTML

So I'm working on a micro lib, html.js, and basically it creates text nodes with document.createTextNode but when I want to create a text node with a b I get a b so I'm wondering how to escape the & char, without using innerHTML ideally..

Javascript supports the \uXXXX notation, so in the case of a non-breaking space, that would be \u00A0.
document.createTextNode('a\u00A0b');
That's as far as you can get. It's a text node, consisting only of text, and there's no difference between texts created from entity references or from normal characters.
If that's not what you want, you should take a second look at innerHtml. Can't you read it, modify it and put it back?

There's not much functionality in js to encode/decode html entities. Seems like there some libraries out there, though, that can help you achieve this. Here is one I found on goodle.. haven't tried it, but you can check it out, or look for others.
http://www.strictly-software.com/htmlencode

How to paste Text from Word to plain text by preserve defined styles?

I want to let the user paste text to an editor (currently CKEditor). By pasting the text all styles and elements which are not white-listed must be removed, including images, tables etc. So 90% should be converted to plain text or be removed while some simple styles like bold, italic or underlined should be preserved.
Didn't thought that's so complicated. But all I can find within the documentation and the samples of CKEditor is about pasting complete plain text or pasting cleaned up content from Word without the ability to configure a white-list (and even if I remove all table-related plugins it is still possible to paste a table from MS WorD).
I really, really appreciate any hint.
Thanks.

You can't without writing your own parser. Another issue is MS word uses Windows-1252 character encoding and most of the web uses UTF-8 encoding, so if you paste from WORD and transmit this data via AJAX, it will be garbled.
While Dreamweaver has a pretty good "paste from word" feature, it's unlikely you'll find an online equivalent. This is a huge and complex problem that would be an application in itself. Even WORD's "save as HTML" can't even do a decent job of it.
Sadly, what most have to do, is strip it all down to ASCII (paste into Notepad), put it in the editor and mark it back up.

You can add a listener for the 'paste' event in the editor instance: http://docs.cksource.com/ckeditor_api/symbols/CKEDITOR.editor.html#event:paste
That way you get the HTML that it's gonna get pasted and you can perform whatever clean up you need (for example based on inserting that html into a div and then work with the DOM, or using regexps on the string).

Found a solution:
Listening to the paste event as AlfonsoML wrote.
Sending the pasted content of Word to the server.
Parsing it with the HTML Agility Pack.
Sending it back to the client.
Inserting it within the editor.

Greasemonkey: Text processing - What's the best way to find certain words in a website and have a function work on it?

I want greasemonkey to scan through a website and change certain words to something else. Is there a way to do it with regex or some other string processing function in javascript?
Thanks for your help :)

In greasemonkey you use the DOM and then on the text nodes regular expressions might be used for finding your words. Check the Wikiproxy user script for an example that searches for words and changes stuff.