Regex catch string between two strings, multiple lines

Question

I´m working on a *.po file, I´m trying to catch all the text between msgid "" and msgstr "", not really lucky, never more than one line:

msgid ""
"%s asdfgh asdsfgf asdfg %s even if you "
"asdfgdh sentences with no sense. We are not asking  translate "
"Shakespeare's %s Hamlet %s !. %s testing regex %s "
"don't require specific industry knowledge. enjoying "
msgstr ""

What I´ve tried:

var myArray = fileContent.match(/msgid ([""'])(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?\1/g);

Thanks for your help, I´m not really good with regex :(

Andrew Clark · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-31 16:32:05Z

10

Here is one way to extract all of that text:

var match = text.replace(/msgid ""([\s\S]*?)msgstr ""/, "$1");

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/bqk79/

The [\s\S] is a character class that will match any character including line breaks, so [\s\S]*? will match any number of any character. In other languages you could use the s or DOTALL flag to make . match line breaks, but Javascript does not support this.

Note that you regex doesn't make any mention of single quotes, but if you need to be able to match between msgid '' and msgstr '' as well you can use the following:

var match = text.replace(/msgid (['"]{2})([\s\S]*?)msgstr \1/, "$2");

answered May 31, 2013 at 16:32

Andrew Clark

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1 Comment

Karthikeyan Over a year ago

Simply My two days search, ends here.

Casimir et Hippolyte · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-31 16:39:32Z

2

Try with this pattern:

/msgid (["']{2})\n([\s\S]*?)\nmsgstr \1/

The result is in the second capturing group, but you can make more simple with:

/msgid ["']{2}\n([\s\S]*?)\nmsgstr /

in the first capturing group

edited May 31, 2013 at 16:39

answered May 31, 2013 at 16:26

Casimir et Hippolyte

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1 Comment

Andrew Clark Over a year ago

s flag does not exist in Javascript.

Eric Seastrand · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-02 16:26:39Z

2

I realize that the question specifically asks for a regular expression, but you should consider using string split instead if you can.

Here is a ready-made function:

function extractTextBetween(subject, start, end) {
    try{
        return subject.split(start)[1].split(end)[0];
    } catch(e){
        console.log("Exception when extracting text", e);
    }
}

http://jsfiddle.net/b33hdh9b/3/

answered Oct 2, 2015 at 16:26

Eric Seastrand

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Jerry · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-31 16:32:20Z

1

You could perhaps try this regex?

msgid ""((?:.|[\n\r])+)msgstr ""

((?:.|[\n\r])+) this is your catching group;

(?:.|[\n\r])+ This enables the match of . or [\n\r] multiple times, the \n\r are for newlines and carriage returns.

Tested

answered May 31, 2013 at 16:32

Jerry

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