Question

I am attempting to use regexes in jQuery, and I am running into some problems. This is the string that I am operating on:

NSLog(@"It works!");

I want the regex to select everything between the @” and the “, inclusive. This regex works just fine in Reggy, but when put in my JavaScript, does not work:

@".*"

My jQuery code is as follows in this section (is single-quotes the issue, perhaps?):

var regex='@".*"';
$(".syntaxhighlight").highlight(regex,'string');

I know the issue is not the highlight() function, because this works just fine:

$(".syntaxhighlight").highlight('nil','string');

So, how do I get this regex working properly?

Answer 1

The highlight() feature uses String.indexOf() internally, which doesn’t support regular expression objects.

However, it can be rewritten like so:

$.fn.extend({
 highlight: function(pat) {
  function innerHighlight(node, pat) {
   var skip = 0;
   if (node.nodeType == 3) {
    var res;

    while (res = pat.exec(node.data)) {
     var spannode = document.createElement('span');
     spannode.className = 'highlight';
     var middlebit = node.splitText(res.index);
     var endbit = middlebit.splitText(res[0].length);
     var middleclone = middlebit.cloneNode(true);
     spannode.appendChild(middleclone);
     middlebit.parentNode.replaceChild(spannode, middlebit);
     skip = 1;
    }
   }
   else if (node.nodeType == 1 && node.childNodes && !/(script|style)/i.test(node.tagName)) {
    for (var i = 0; i < node.childNodes.length; ++i) {
     i += innerHighlight(node.childNodes[i], pat);
    }
   }
   return skip;
  }
  return this.length && pat ? this.each(function() {
   innerHighlight(this, pat);
  }) : this;
}
});