Question

I have a problem to do a replace in javascript with regex

this is the code

var link = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
var i = link.length;
   while(i--){
      var lnk = link[i].href;
       lnk.replace('/^http\:\/\/www\.ringtonematcher\.com\/go\/\?sid\=([\w]+)\&/g', 'test');
    }

sid=replace& = sid=test&

Answer 1

I guess your problem is that you don’t do anything with the result of the replace method. It does not alter anything, but returns a new string. If you’d want to change the href attributes, you will need to reassign it:

var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for (var i=0; i<links.length; i++) {
    var lnk = link[i].href;
    var newlnk = lnk.replace(/^http:\/\/www\.ringtonematcher\.com\/go\/\?sid=(\w+)&/g, 'test$1');
    link[i].href = newlnk;
}

I also fixed some flaws in your regex:

• It needs to be a regex literal, not a string (remove the apostrophes)
• You don’t need to escape the :, = or & characters
• You don’t need to wrap the character class shortcut \w in a character class
• You don’t want the \w+ to be greedy