JavaScript match and replace; what is the best way?

Question

So I've already got this working but I'm hoping someone can help me optimize it.

I have a ton of XML data that I'm grabbing and do not have control over. One of the tags has markup in it and instead of using >, < and " it uses the HTML names. I've setup a really simple function to return the string with the proper elements so that I can write it to the page.

I'm just wondering, can my cleanFeedDescription() function be done a little cleaner and more optimized?

<script type="text/javascript">
        var textString = '&lt;img src=&quot;/media/filter/small/transfer/a0/46/21ca7da7/3569/1774/cf3f/82634fc4/img/4th_of_july_209.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt; &lt;p class=&quot;long-description&quot;&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;uploaded-date&quot;&gt;Uploaded 2010-11-29 18:24:24&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;uploaded-by&quot;&gt;by gin_alvizo&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;uploaded-to&quot;&gt;part of Bull&#039;s-Eye Bold BBQ powered by ...&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;';

        document.write(cleanFeedDescription(textString));

        function cleanFeedDescription(descString) {

            descString = descString.replace(/&lt;/g, '<');
            descString = descString.replace(/&gt;/g, '>');
            descString = descString.replace(/&quot;/g, '"');

            return descString;
        };
    </script>

Vincent Robert · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-18 14:28:34Z

2

I suggest you to use only one replace with a function instead of many, this will be faster and easier to maintain.

function cleanFeedDescription(descString) 
{
    var replacements = { lt: '<', gt: '>', quot: '"' };

    return descString.replace(/&(\w+);/g, function(str, entity)
    {
        return replacements[entity] || "";
    });
};

edited Dec 18, 2010 at 14:28

answered Dec 17, 2010 at 19:08

Vincent Robert

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1 Comment

Smccullough Over a year ago

This seems like a much more simple and cleaner solution than concatenating a bunch of .replace() methods or using bloated third party scripts to obtain my desired result. Thanks! p.s. I needed to modify your regExp... added "g" to the end of it! :)

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:11:50Z

2

Here is a handy JS library that does the HTML entity encoding/decoding for you, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Alternately, if you're using jQuery, there's a similar question on SO with a jQuery-centric solution.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:11

CommunityBot

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answered Dec 17, 2010 at 18:59

Daniel DiPaolo

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Comments

MooGoo · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-17 19:08:13Z

0

Well you don't really need to assign intermediate values to descString, so you could do it like this...

return descString.replace(/&lt;/g, '<')
                 .replace(/&gt;/g, '>')
                 .replace(/&quot;/g, '"');

answered Dec 17, 2010 at 19:08

MooGoo

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