Remove double quotes from object properties unless start with number

Question

I've googled and gone through stack overflow Q&A's but haven't found this exact scenario. I have an object like so:

props: {
  "label": "1rem",
  "text3": "1rem",
  "text2Button": "1rem",
  "1": "1rem",
  "5spacing": 2
}

I am using this regex pattern to capture the object property names and remove the double quotes based on a simplified version of another answer:

/"([^"]+)":/g

This worked great, but I wanted the numbers to keep their double quotes, so I changed it to this:

/"([^"0-9]+)":/g

However, this only matches "label" and any property with a number is excluded. I understand why this is happening, what I can't figure out is how do I match properties that have a number in them but exclude those that begin with a number.

The desired regex pattern would match "label", "text3", and "text2Button" only so that I could then transform the object to this:

props: {
  label: "1rem",
  text3: "1rem",
  text2Button: "1rem",
  "1": "1rem",
  "5spacing": 2
}

(I couldn't figure out how to do combine the exclude ^ with the start of string ^. Nor could I figure out the proper place to add the | operator, or if that was even the correct approach.)

Is there any reason to use regex for parsing JSON in JavaScript ? Also keys in JSON are supposed to be strings. — Seblor, Oct 14 '19 at 15:54
This is being applied after the JSON has been parsed to a string. And the end result for this is not JSON. — David Yeiser, Oct 14 '19 at 15:57
Why not just use: let obj = JSON.parse(str); to initialize your object? — Harish Vangavolu, Oct 14 '19 at 16:08
Also parseInt(str) will yield "NaN" unless the string (str) begins with a number so I believe another option is to check the truthiness of !!parseInt(property) since NaN is falsy. — Harish Vangavolu, Oct 14 '19 at 16:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 14 '19 at 16:03

2

Your pattern doesn't work because [^"0-9]+ requires all the character to be neither " nor a digit while you only want to make sure the first character is not a digit.

You may use the following pattern:

/"([^0-9][^"]*)":/g

Demo.

answered Oct 14 '19 at 16:03

41686d6564 stands w. Palestine

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lagripe · Answer 2 · 2019-10-14T16:10:41.070

1

Use this regex : Regex :

\"([a-zA-Z]\w*)\"(?=:)

Demo : Here

edited Oct 14 '19 at 16:10

answered Oct 14 '19 at 16:01

lagripe

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Note that this will not match `"a":`. You should replace `\w+` with `\w*`. – 41686d6564 stands w. Palestine Oct 14 '19 at 16:08
Thank you! This one works as well (with the single property name exception mentioned above). And I appreciate the diagram. I'm going to accept the other answer as it's closer to the original pattern of telling what to exclude rather than include. – David Yeiser Oct 14 '19 at 16:10

Remove double quotes from object properties unless start with number

2 Answers2