I have this string: "\W\W\R\"
I want to use regex to produce this string: <span>W</span><span>W</span>\R
Here is my code:
"\W\W\R".replace(/\\W/g, "<span>W</span>");
Because the pattern "\W" is a character class, none of the escaping I'm trying to do is responding. How should this be written?
The \ in the string is used to escape the special characters following it, so your string \W\W\R is treated as WWR.
When run on command line
> '\W\W\R'
WWR
Double escape the slashes in the string
var str = "\\W\\W\\R".replace(/\\W/g, "<span>W</span>");
console.log(str);The problem is not the regex, it is your string, in string \ is a escape character, so if you want \W\W\R then your string literal should be "\\W\\W\\R" SO
var res = "\\W\\W\\R".replace(/\\W/g, "<span>W</span>");
snippet.log(res)<!-- Provides the `snippet` object, see http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/242144/134069 -->
<script src="http://tjcrowder.github.io/simple-snippets-console/snippet.js"></script>Try RegExp constructor new RegExp("(\W)|(R$)", "g") return replacement string from ternary match === "W" ? "<span>" + match + "</span>" : "\\" + match within .replace() function
var str = "\W\W\R" , res;
res = str.replace(new RegExp("(\W)|(R$)", "g"), function(match) {
return match === "W" ? "<span>" + match + "</span>" : "\\" + match
});
console.log(res);
document.write(res);simply ensure that the character matched is actually the capital letter 'W' by wrapping it in a square bracket []
"\W\W\R".replace(/[W]/g, "<span>W</span>");
:)
"\W\W\R" in javascript actually means "WWR", so we can just ignore the backslash ` \ `. See: stackoverflow.com/questions/2479309/….