Question

I am trying to make my regex work across multiple lines and “m” didn’t seem to work either. So, my regex is working for 1st line and noT for the following lines.

Answer 1

You can skip the match part and just do it all in one step:

> "the  *text* is to be replaced \n by *text*".replace(/\*([\s\S]*?)\*/g, '<i>$1</i>');
"the  <i>text</i> is to be replaced \n by <i>text</i>"

• . matches any character, but it excludes newlines. [\s\S] matches any character including newlines.

• I changed your search regex to \*([\s\S]*?)\*, which non-greedily matches the stuff between the asterisks.

• The replacement string is <i>$1</i>. $1 is replaced with the contents of the first capturing group, which is your text.

Also, because it looks like you’re trying to convert Markdown to HTML, try using a pre-made JS converter: http://www.showdown.im/

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You can use it like this:

var str = "the  *text* is to be *replaced \n by* *text*";

alert(str.replace(/\*([\s\S]*?)\*/g, '<i>$1</i>'));