Capturing everything in a string with a regular expression

Question

So I have a string that will have basically any kind of text in it and I want to capture all the text with regular expression and replace it.

var img_url = "http://grfx.domain.com/photos/dir/school/dir/m-dir/auto_original/123456.jpeg?123456";
img_url.replace(/regexp/,newvalue);

Just trying to capture everything in the img_url var and replace it.

Thanks!

Can you clarify what you mean. do you want to overwrite the contents with a new string or just replace part of it — Simon Laing, Sep 20 '12 at 18:55
[Learn these first.](http://www.regular-expressions.info/) Then if you think you still want to do what you have just written using a regex use this `/^.*$/`. — Krzysztof Jabłoński, Sep 20 '12 at 18:59

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 20 '12 at 18:52

7

Well, if you want to replace everything, you don't need regex. Simply write:

 img_url = newvalue;

If you are really determined to do this with a regular expression, this could help:

 img_url = img_url.replace(/.*/, newvalue);

answered Sep 20 '12 at 18:52

kapa

77,694
21
158
175

2

Oh, I lolled. This, OP. This. – FrankieTheKneeMan Sep 20 '12 at 18:53
1

+1 for the assignment suggestion :) – Elias Van Ootegem Sep 20 '12 at 18:56
Thanks, all solutions worked, but I ended up going with .innerHTML to write what I needed in html instead of replacing it with an image. – Justin Sep 20 '12 at 22:10

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:27

If you're reassigning, just use =
If you want to replace all matches in one go, use the g flag, in which case this question is a duplicate of this post

If that expression needs to be dynamic:

var expr = new RegExp(replaceVar,'gi');//globally, and case-insensitively
var newUrl = oldUrl.replace(expr,replacement);

Note that, here, all back-slashes like you'd use for \b have to be escaped, too: \\b and \\/ for forward slashes. and \\\\ for an escaped backslash

Capturing everything in a string with a regular expression

2 Answers2