Question

How can I replace double backslashes “\\” within the given string after the word, content, with only a single backslash, \?

var a = "blah blah \\ \\ content:\"whiskey \\\\";

so that it shows up as:

var a = "blah blah \\ \\ content:\"whiskey \\";

I tried the following without success.

 a.replace(/content:*\\\\\"/g, "\\"));

Answer 1

Rather than trying to tackle the entire problem with a regular expression, I’d just break the string on “content” and do replacement on right half.

function fn(x) { 
    var i = x.indexOf("content");
    return x.substr(0,i) + x.substr(i).replace(/\\\\/g, "\\");
}

// this evaluates true
fn("blah blah \\ \\ \\\\ content:\"whiskey \\\\\\\\ \\\\") ==
   "blah blah \\ \\ \\\\ content:\"whiskey \\\\ \\"