Question

Consider this string,

var string = "sometext/#a=some_text/#b=25/moretext";

What I would like to do is extract the values of "a" and "b" ("some_text" and 25)

So essentially what I want to do is find "#a=" and grab everything before the following /, then do the same for b. How can this be accomplished? Additionally, would I use the same expression to change the values in the string?

I got a hand doing this with PHP, but now I can’t figure it out for JavaScript.

Edit

Here’s the PHP version of extraction:

$string = "sometext/#a=some_text/#b=25/moretext";

$expr = '@#([a-z]+)=(.+?)/@';
$count = preg_match_all($expr, $string, $matches);

$result = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++) {
    $result[$matches[1][$i]] = $matches[2][$i];
}

print_r($result[b]);

(output would be "some_text")

Answer 1

If you are looking to extract all the values and store them in a dictionary as name/value pairs, you can use this:

var regexp = /#(.*?)=(.*?)\//g;
var string = "sometext/#a=some_text/#b=25/moretext";
var match;

var result = {};

while ((match = regexp.exec(string)) != null) {
  result[match[1]] = match[2];
}

alert(JSON.stringify(result));