Trying to parse the following text:
This is one of the [name]John's[/name] first tutorials.
or
Please invite [name]Steven[/name] to the meeting.
What I need is to do a regexp in Javascript to get the name.
Doing var str = body.match(/[name](.*?)[\/name]/g); works, but how do I get just the inside of it?
Try using the "exec" method of a regular expression to get the matching groups as an array:
var getName = function(str) {
var m = /\[name\](.*?)\[\/name\]/.exec(str);
return (m) ? m[1] : null;
}
var john = getName("This is one of [name]John's[/name] first tutorials.");
john // => "John's"
var steve = getName("Please invite [name]Steven[/name] to the meeting.");
steve // => "Steven"
This could be easily extended to find all occurrences of names by using a global RegExp:
var getAllNames = function(str) {
var regex = /\[name\](.*?)\[\/name\]/g
, names = []
, match;
while (match = regex.exec(str)) {
names.push(match[1]);
}
return names;
}
var names = getAllNames("Hi [name]John[/name], and [name]Steve[/name]!");
names; // => ["John", "Steve"]
You want to access the matched groups. For an explanation, see here: How do you access the matched groups in a JavaScript regular expression?
You made a mistake in your regexp, you have to escape brackets: \[name\]. Just writing [name] in regexp means that there should be either 'n' or 'a' or 'm' or 'e'. And in your case you just want to tell that you look for something started with '[name]' as string
altogether:
/\[name\](.*?)\[\/name\]/g.exec('Please invite [name]Steven[/name] to the meeting.');
console.info( RegExp.$1 ) // "Steven"
You can use RegExp.$1, RegExp.$2, all the way to RegExp.$9 to access the part(s) inside the parenthesis. In this case, RegExp.$1 would contain the text in between the [name] and [/name].
[name]...[/name] tags, doing (.*) will do a greedy match and match everything between the first [name] and last [/name].