replace string using regex

Question

I have text inside "textarea" and I was trying to remove the text between: <textarea></textarea> using replace function with some regex. here is what I did so far:

x = '<TEXTAREA style="DISPLAY: none" id=test name=test>teeeeessst!@#$%&*(LKJHGFDMNBVCX</TEXTAREA>';

x.replace('/<TEXTAREA style="DISPLAY: none" id=test name=test>.*</TEXTAREA>/s','<TEXTAREA style="DISPLAY: none" id=test name=test></TEXTAREA>');

Eric Wendelin · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-22 12:55:18Z

2

You'll probably want something like this:

x.replace(/(<textarea[^>]*>)[^<]+(<\/textarea>)/img, '$1$2');

This will replace things case-insensitively within multi-line strings and avoiding greedy matches of things like ".*"

answered Jul 22, 2010 at 12:55

Eric Wendelin

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2 Comments

Desolator Over a year ago

thanks man this one works like charm.. really appreciated :)

Alan Moore Over a year ago

The m modifier only matters if there are anchors (^ or $) in the regex.

Pointy · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-22 12:48:58Z

1

First problem is that you've got your regex inside quotes. It should just be /regex/ without quotes. Then you're going to have to put a backslash before the forward slash in the regex.

/<TEXTAREA style="DISPLAY: none" id=test name=test>.*<\/TEXTAREA>/

There's no regex flag "s", so I don't know what you thought it means but just drop it.

answered Jul 22, 2010 at 12:48

Pointy

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3 Comments

Desolator Over a year ago

I really don't know how to use regex with javascript. it seems like different from PHP.

Pointy Over a year ago

Yes, it's different. Not a lot different, but different.

Alan Moore Over a year ago

You mean there's no s flag in JavaScript regexes. To get the same effect we usually use replace the . with [\s\S], but in this case [^<] is more appropriate, as @Eric showed.

unigg · Accepted Answer · 2010-08-08 05:13:38Z

0

Similar to Eric's method, or use more general regexp.

var re =/(\<[^<]+\>)[^<]+(<\/[^<]+>)/;

x = x.replace(re, '$1$2');

You can use this tool to have a test. The result should be output to testarea.

answered Aug 8, 2010 at 5:13

unigg

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