Is there an equivalent in jQuery to PHP's `preg_replace()`?

Question

Say I have the following:

<img src="http://www.site.com/folder/pic.jpg">

This path could be anything, we basically want to get the "pic.jpg as a variable.

Currently we are doing it like so:

var first_img = $("#thumbnail-area li:first").find("img").attr("title");

Which sets the first_img variable as the image src, but we want to do a preg match kinda thing like in PHP to grab the "pic.jpg".

This has to work properly, so the path could be: folder/foo/bar/x982j/second822.jpg and it'd return second822.jpg

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You could use replace() which is like PHP's preg_replace() (it too accepts a PCRE, with some limitations such as no look behinds)...

str.replace(/.*\//, '')

jsFiddle.

Alternatively, you could use...

str.split('/').pop();

jsFiddle.

Answer 2

jQuery is not necessary here; Javascript supports regular expressions on its own, so jQuery is not part of the answer.

Javascript's regex replace function is simply called .replace(), and is a method on the string class. You would use it as follows:

var mystring = 'this is a string';
mystring.replace(/is a/,'might be a');
//mystring is now equal to 'this might be a string'.

That should be enough to get you started. Since you referenced preg_replace() in the question, I assume you already know how to use regular expressions well enough not to need a detailed discussion of how to solve your specific example.

Answer 3

Working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/jkeyes/sxx3T/

var re = new RegExp(".*\/(.*)$");
var src="folder/foo/bar/x982j/second822.jpg";
var m = re.exec(src);
alert(m[1]); // first group