Question

I’m given a horribly delimited string of ids. Each id is surrounded by a space(‘ ‘) on the left and a carriage return on the right(‘\r’). I want to split this string and get back all the ids in javascript.

For example:
' hey\r my\r name\r is\r' should return array of ['hey', 'my', 'name', 'is']

So far I tried:

str.split(/ (.+)\r/g)
str.split(/(?:\s)(.+)(?:\r)/)
str.split(/\s(.+?=\r)/)

All but to no avail. I got the closest with str.split(/(?:\s)(.+)(?:\r)/), but it gives me:
['', 'hey', '', 'my', '', 'name', '', 'is', ''].
What is matching the empty strings?

What is the regex to match this?

EDIT:

Id can have any other whitespace char, so this is a valid id: 123\t234\n. and
‘ abc\r 123\n456\t\r’ should return [‘abc’, ‘123\n456\t’ ]

Thanks!

Answer 1

How about:

var parts = str.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '').split(/\s+/)

that is, remove the leading and trailing white space characters and then just split on inner white space characters (and consume them all).

> var str = ' hey\r my\r name\r is\r'
  undefined
> str.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '').split(/\s+/)
  ["hey", "my", "name", "is"]

---

If you only want to split on \r then:

.split(/\r +/)

and you can change the trimming to:

.replace(/^[\r ]+|[\r ]+$/g, '')