Can I change the href value of a link using javascript RegExp?

Question

You may have see various sites where URLs are encoded by an advertisement redirection service. I want to write a personal javascript snippet to remove this spam.

Mostly, the HTML will look like this:

<a target="_blank" href="http://ads.example.com/246619/http://www.example.net/path/I/want">SteamTable App</a>

The problem is that the URL path http://ads.example.com/246619/ is different for each link.

My attempt:

$(function() {
    var x = $('div.content.clearfix a').get();
    //alert(x.length);
    for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++) {
        var Href = $(x[i]).attr('href');

        Href = Href.replace("http://ads.example.com/.*?/", "");
        alert(Href);  //success or not
        $(x[i]).attr('href', Href);
    }
});

Demo on JS Fiddle.

I don't know why this isn't working.

Robert Harvey · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-25 17:50:51Z

3

Remove the quotes around your regex and use regex delimiters

Href = Href.replace(/http:\/\/url.sh\/.*?\//, "");

edited Sep 25, 2014 at 17:50

Robert Harvey

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answered Mar 7, 2012 at 8:41

stema

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2 Comments

nightcrawler Over a year ago

what is the difference b/w my method & this one:Href=Href.replace( /http\:\/\/url.sh\/[^\/]+\//i, "") ;

stema Over a year ago

The [^\/]+ is a substitution for the lazy matching of all characters .*?. Its matching any character, but the slash, so the result should be the same. This regex is ending with the i modifier its making the regex matching case independend, i.e. "a" will also match "A", but since there are not letters in the regex its useless here.

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