Question

I have a really weird number in my mongoDB document. I copied the whole object over to the node console. I’m outputting it here. I’m thinking it has a combination of string \n‘s and actual textual \n‘s or something weird going on. Can someone tell me how to just get the number 567899876545678987654 as a string, out of the variable below?

> number
'--- \n- "567899876545678987654"\n- \n'
> JSON.stringify(number);
'"--- \\n- \\"567899876545678987654\\"\\n- \\n"'
> number.replace("\n","");
'--- - "567899876545678987654"\n- \n'
> number.replace(/\n/,"");
'--- - "567899876545678987654"\n- \n'
> number.replace(/-/,"");
'-- \n- "567899876545678987654"\n- \n'

Answer 1

Why not use a regex for all digits instead of trying to remove the rest?

actualNumber = number.match(/\d+/);

As T.J. Crowder points out, actualNumber will now be an array containing the number (if there was one). As he suggests, this will safely retrieve the actual number:

var m = number.match(/\d+/);
if (m) { 
    actualNumber = m[0];
}