Question

I need to manipulate a link href which looks like this:

/agents/view/model:Member/ag_start_dateMonth:08/ag_start_dateYear:2012/ag_end_dateMonth:08/ag_end_dateYear:2012

I need to catch the part: ag_start_dateMonth and replace the value 08 with a value the user selected through a form.

That means, that I need to find where in the string is this pattern ag_start_dateMonth and to find the value just after the : and before the next / and to replace it with a new value given by the user through form select option.

How can I do this?
Please advice, I am quite unsure about regex syntax :-/

Answer 1

If this input come from a form on the page, you can always “Rebuild” the href instead of search and replace. Say you have a form you were getting these values from on the page, with jQuery this would be trivial with something like

jQuery('#id-of-form button').click( function () {
    var start_month = jQuery('#id-of-form select.start-month').val();
    var start_year = jQuery('#id-of-form select.start-year').val();
    var end_month = jQuery('#id-of-form select.end-month').val();
    var end_year = jQuery('#id-of-form select.end-year').val();
    jQuery(a#your-link-id).attr('href','/agents/view/model:Member/ag_start_dateMonth:' +
         start_month + '/ag_startdateYear:' + start_year + "/ag_end_dateMonth:" +
         end_month + '/ag_end_dateYear:' + end_year);
});