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up vote 1 down vote favorite

I'm wondering how to change this exact php regex feature into javascript?

$ismatch= preg_match('|She is a <span><b>(.*)</b></span>|si', $sentence, $matchresult);

if($ismatch)
{
      $gender= $matchresult[1];
}
else{ //do other thing }
share|improve this question

closed as too localized by Juhana, knittl, kapa, bmargulies, mario Mar 4 '12 at 21:09

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, visit the help center.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
    
Bad news, JS doesn't support the dotall switch stackoverflow.com/questions/1068280/… – Petah Mar 4 '12 at 11:33
    
This could be a good question if phrased properly and the focus was on the dotall modifier... in its current state it sounds like a "Do the work for me" question. – Felix Kling Mar 4 '12 at 11:36

1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

This is not quite trivial since JavaScript doesn't support the s modifier.

The equivalent regex object would be

/She is a <span><b>([\s\S]*)<\/b><\/span>/i

The functionality of the code (extracting group 1 from the match if there is a match) would be done in JavaScript like this:

var myregexp = /She is a <span><b>([\s\S]*)<\/b><\/span>/i;
var match = myregexp.exec(subject);
if (match != null) {
    result = match[1];
} else {
    // do other thing
}
share|improve this answer
1  
Information about the [\s\S] approach can be found at MDN: (The decimal point) matches any single character except the newline characters: \n \r \u2028 or \u2029. ([\s\S] can be used to match any character including newlines.) – Felix Kling Mar 4 '12 at 11:34
    
Or use the special JS feature [^], it matches any character. – Qtax Mar 4 '12 at 11:50
    
@Qtax: Wow, I'd never seen this before. Is there any documentation about this? – Tim Pietzcker Mar 4 '12 at 12:15
    
@Tim, don't know, haven't seen it documented, but haven't really looked for it either. Unlike Perl/PCRE in JS the first unescaped ] seems to end the character class without exceptions, thus [^] would match everything except nothing, i.e everything. – Qtax Mar 4 '12 at 13:08

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