Question

I need to extract 3 fields from a snippet of text. I’ve got a regex that extracts 2 of those fields – file and extension. I don’t know how to extract the content text and I don’t have a strategy for matching all characters except ‘not a pattern’.

The pattern is: var regex_file = /<!--<\|(.*)\.(.*)\|>-->/g,

Also, I’m not sure a regex is the best way to do this. I considered the string method split: split(regex_file)

But I don’t think there is a way to keep the delimiter one splits on. It just returns the the content between the delimiter. Also, I don’t think there is a way to loop through split() as I did through exec() below.

What is the best way to extract these 3 fields from text in the structure below. Further below is what I have so far.

Text Structure

<!--<|file.extension|>-->

// 1-10k of content text

<!--<|file.extension|>-->

// 1-10k of content text

<!--<|file.extension|>-->

// 1-10k of content text

First Attempt

    /*addNodes
    **
    **
    **
    */
    function addNodes(text) {
        var regex_file = /<!--<\|(.*)\.(.*)\|>-->/g,
            arr_file;

        while ((arr_file = regex_file.exec(text)) !== null) {
            arr_file[1] // holds file 
            arr_file[2] // holds extension
            arr_file[3] // need content here
        }
    }

Additional Criteria:

IE10+, FF10+, Safari5+, Chrome20+…Major Modern Browsers.

Answer 1

You were pretty close. The delimiter can be kept with regex:

s = "<!--<|file.extension|>--> // 1-10k of content text <!--<|file.extension|>--> // 1-10k of content text <!--<|file.extension|>--> // 1-10k of content text"
a = s.split(/<!--<\|([^.]*)(\.[^|]*)\|>-->/g)
for (i = 1; i < a.length; i += 3) {
  console.log('result:');
  console.log('  "'+a[i]  +'"');
  console.log('  "'+a[i+1]+'"');
  console.log('  "'+a[i+2]+'"');
}

output:

result:
  "file"
  ".extension"
  " // 1-10k of content text "
result:
  "file"
  ".extension"
  " // 1-10k of content text "
result:
  "file"
  ".extension"
  " // 1-10k of content text"

I was able to manually test it successfully for ie9, chrome23 on windows and chrome23, safari6, ff6 on on osx10.

I also threw it on browsershots.org and execution was successful for these versions:

firefox: 3.6.27 4.0.1 5.0.1 1.5.0.12 10.0.2 6.0.1 11.0 11.0 12.0 13.0 14.0.1 17.0 7.0.1 15.0 16.0 2.0.0.20 8.0.1 9.0.1 18.0 17.0 19.0 3.6.28 16.0 9.0.1 10.0.2 17.0 6.0.2 7.0.1 8.0 12.0 14.0.1 13.0.1 4.0.1 15.0 5.0.1 3.0.10 19.0 18.0

msie: 10.0

safari: 3.2.3 5.1.7 5.1.7 6.0 5.0

chrome: 7.0.517.44 23.0.1271.101 17.0.963.56 8.0.552.224 17.0.963.56 22.0.1229.26 23.0.1251.2 22.0.1312.45 9.0.597.107 11.0.696.77 10.0.612.1 12.0.742.112 13.0.782.218 14.0.835.202 15.0.874.106 18.0.1025.33 19.0.1041.0 20.0.1132.57 21.0.1180.89 24.0.1312.45 23.0.1271.97 16.0.912.77 2.0.172.31 6.0.472.63

It was not successful for:
chrome 20.0.1132.47 on ubuntu-12.04-lts

or versions of msie < 10