Question

I have an regular expression built in Java.

String expr = "<a.*?id=\"(pres.*?)\".*?>Discharge.*?Medications:</a>";

I want to use same regular expression in Javascript.
Will it be different or same?

Answer 1

I suggest you don’t do it.

Why? I will just point you out to one of the most upvoted answer on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/851498

In javascript, you’d better use the DOM than a regex to parse HTML.

Example:

var a = document.querySelectorAll('a');
for ( var i = 0, len = a.length; i < len; i++ ) {
    // If the id starts with "pres"
    if ( a[ i ].id.substr( 0, 3 ) === 'pres' ) {
        // check a[ i ].textContent
    }
}

Or if you’re using jQuery:

$('a').each( function() {
    if ( this.id.substr( 0, 3 ) === 'pres' ) {
        // check $( this ).text()
    }
} );

I didn’t code the last part, but you get the idea. Using a regex on $( this ).text() would be fine, it’s not HTML.