JQuery: how to replace all between certain characters?

Question

I have searched for a general solution to this but only find answers to peoples specific questions.

Basically, I want to know how to generally use .replace() to replace items in between any kind of characters in a string, eg:

Replace all text in between and inclusive of abc and xyz eg: abc text to be replaced xyz

or replace all text in between and inclusive of <img and /> eg: <img src="image.jpg" />

Can anyone help me out or point me in the direction of a good tute on this?

Thanks! Let me know if I need to clarify more.

Christophe · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-14T01:33:54.953

6

What you are looking for are called regular expressions. For more information, you can visit a site like: http://www.regular-expressions.info/

Note that regular expressions are not specific to JavaScript.

For your specific example:

string.replace(/abc.+xyz/,"abc"+newString+"xyz");

. means any character, and + means one or more occurences.

If you have more than one replacement to do, try:

string.replace(/abc.+?xyz/g,"abc"+newString+"xyz");

g stands for general, and ? is the lazy quantifier, meaning that it will stop at the next occurence of xyz in the string.

edited Jun 14 '12 at 01:33

answered Jun 13 '12 at 23:54

Christophe

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You probably want to use a lazy quantifier. – Cameron Martin Jun 14 '12 at 00:00
Thanks Christophe but I cannot seem to get it working on more then one occasion. The string I tried it on has several instances of images and using .replace(//,""); I was able to remove the first one, but not any of the others. Should this be adjusted? – MeltingDog Jun 14 '12 at 00:28
For multiple occurences, I have updated the answer and included the lazy quantifier per @ddlshack's suggestion. – Christophe Jun 14 '12 at 01:35

wolfhammer · Answer 2 · 2016-01-30T18:42:48.920

    String.prototype.replaceBetween = function(opentag, closetag, replacement) {
      var read_index = 0;
      var open_index = 0;
      var close_index = 0;
      var output = '';

      while ((open_index = this.indexOf(opentag, read_index)) != -1) {
        output += this.slice(read_index, open_index) + opentag;
        read_index = open_index + opentag.length;

        if ((close_index = this.indexOf(closetag, read_index)) != -1) {
          if (typeof replacement === 'function') {
            output += replacement(this.substring(open_index + opentag.length, close_index - 1)) + closetag;
          } else {
            output += replacement + closetag;
          }
          read_index = close_index + closetag.length;
        }
      }

      output += this.slice(read_index);

      return output
    };

    var mydiv = document.getElementById("mydiv");
    var html = mydiv.innerHTML;
    html = html.replaceBetween("<b>", "</b>", "hello");
    html = html.replaceBetween("<b>", "</b>", function(body) {
      return body + ' world';
    });
    mydiv.innerHTML = html;

<div id="mydiv">The begining...<b>for</b> and <b>bar</b>... the end.</div>

JQuery: how to replace all between certain characters?

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