Question

I am creating a small library for parsing XML documentation in Javascript files in the following format:

/// <doc type="function" name="parse">
///     <summary>Parses javascript documentation</summary>
///     <param name="js" type="string">Javascript input</param>
/// </doc>
var parse = function(js) { ... };

/// <doc type="string">
///   <summary>Holding the version of our library</summary>
/// </doc>
var VERSION = '0.0.1';

I have to create a regular expression that returns the content between the and tags. I’ve tried the following regular expression but it failed:

var xmlComments = js.match(/ \/\/\/(\s)<doc(.*)>(.*)<\/doc>/gi /);

But the match did not work, I hope someone can help me with this regular expression, thanks.

Answer 1

If you are trying to get the content between the opening and closing doc tags, you could use

/<doc[^>]*>([\s\S]+?)<\/doc>/gi

where [\s\S] is any character including newlines ( . will not match newlines ).

For example

var xmlComments = [],
    regex = /<doc[^>]*>([\s\S]+?)<\/doc>/gi,
    match = regex.exec( js );

while ( match != null ) {
    xmlComments.push( match[1] );
    match = regex.exec( js );
}

where js is the file as a string.