Regular Expression look for string and return everything between curly braces

Question

I've been trying to use the approach suggested by another SO-User: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1820837/1324861

But without luck. Basically, I have a large JSON Object that I transformed into a string using JSON.stringify() in order to execute a regexp pattern against. My idea is to return everything between { } if my search term "soccer" is found anywhere between the curly braces.

My data could look like this:

{
  {
    User: "Peter",
    Hobbies: "Soccer, Football, ...",
    more...
  },
  {
    User: "Simon",
    Hobbies: "Pingpong, Soccer, Badminton",
    more...
  }
}

So if I searched for 'soccer' in my stringified JSON Object I'd like to get back the entire info on the user. How can I do this?

You stringified an object just so you could use a regex to search something in it? — Esailija, Jul 24 '12 at 15:30
Is your JSON object so big that searching against it's string representation is faster? — madfriend, Jul 24 '12 at 15:36

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 24 '12 at 15:50

You could inspire from this (without transforming your json into string):

var myData = [
  {
    User: "Peter",
    Hobbies: "Soccer, Football, ..."
  },
  {
    User: "Simon",
    Hobbies: "Pingpong, Soccer, Badminton"
  }
];
var results = "";
for (var i = 0; i < myData.length; i++) {
    if (myData[i]["Hobbies"].indexOf("Soccer") != -1) {
        results += JSON.stringify(myData [i]) + "\n";
    }                  
}
alert(results);

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 24 '12 at 15:41

1

Not that it doesn't make sense to stringify a JSON object to apply a regex on it (shudder) but hey, it's your CPU... You could use something like this:

\{[^{]+soccer[^}]+}

This should catch what you're looking for. But... Parsing JSON with regexes... Nononono...

answered Jul 24 '12 at 15:41

dda

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I'm not very happy with this approach either but it seems about the only one I can come up with because my JSON is dynamic and with variable depths (aka I may have data.cat1.subcat2.items[] and data.cat2.items[]) and I want to search over all items in all cat/subcats. - have more performant ideas how i could achieve that? – opfeffer Jul 24 '12 at 15:47
2

@opfeffer it doesn't matter what your JSON is, it's always easier, faster and less error-prone to search its object representation – Esailija Jul 24 '12 at 15:48
@opfeffer Could you post a sample of your JSON? Maybe just a a couple of elements, with sub and sub-sub elements? – dda Jul 25 '12 at 02:27

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 24 '12 at 15:42

0

Something like "{[^}]*(S|s)occer[^}]*}"

answered Jul 24 '12 at 15:42

Fanny

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3
4
8

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 24 '12 at 16:02

var json = [
  {
    User: "Peter",
    Hobbies: "Soccer, Football, ..."
  },
  {
    User: "Simon",
    Hobbies: "Pingpong, Badminton"
  }
];


var jsonString = JSON.stringify(json);
var regEx = /(\{.*?Soccer.*?\})/;
var user = jsonString.match(regEx)[1];
document.write(user);

Regular Expression look for string and return everything between curly braces

4 Answers4