Question

I have an editor where its possible to paste a video url, which I by regex convert to an embed code.

The url in the WYSIWYG-editor is:
http://emedia.is.ed.ac.uk:8080/JW/wsconfig.xml&file=mp4:directory/date_submitted/filename-stream-WSwifi.m4v

The output html is:

<p>http://emedia.is.ed.ac.uk:8080/JW/wsconfig.xml&amp;file=mp4:directory/date_submitted/filename-stream-WSwifi.m4v</p>

To look for this I use the following regex in JavaScript:

/http:\/\/(www.)?emedia.is.ed.ac.uk:8080\/JW\/?(.*)?/

But for some reason the match contains the </p> aswell on matchgroup 2? How can I avoid that?

Answer 1

Try this

http:\/\/(www\.)?emedia\.is\.ed\.ac\.uk:8080\/JW\/?([^<]*)

See it here on Regexr.

Instead of matching any character with .* I use [^<]*, meaning match anything but “<“.

I also removed the ? at the end since with the * quantifier you don’t need it, I also escaped all your dots you want to match literally.