Question

I’m having a lot of difficulty matching an image url with spaces.

I need to make this

http://site.com/site.com/files/images/img 2 (5).jpg

into a div like this:

.replace(/(http:\/\/([^\s]+\.(jpg|png|gif)))/ig, "<div style=\"background: url($1)\"></div>")

Here’s the thread about that:
regex matching image url with spaces

Now I’ve decided to first make the spaces into entities so that the above regex will work.

But I’m really having a lot of difficulty doing so.
Something like this:

.replace(/http:\/\/(.*)\/([^\<\>?:;]*?) ([^\<\>?:;]*)(\.(jpe?g|png|gif))/ig, "http://$1/$2%20$3$4")

Replaces one space, but all the rest are still spaces.

I need to write a regex that says, make all spaces between http:// and an image extension (png|jpg|gif) into %20.

At this point, frankly not sure if it’s even possible. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Trying Paolo’s escape:

.escape(/http:\/\/(.*)\/([^\<\>?:;]*?) ([^\<\>?:;]*)(\.(jpe?g|png|gif))/)

Another way I can do this is to escape serverside in PHP, and in PHP I can directly mess with the file name without having to match it in regex.

But as far as I know something like htmlentities do not apply to spaces. Any hints in this direction would be great as well.

Answer 1

If you want to control the replacement character but don’t want to use a regular expression, a simple…

$destName = str_replace(' ', '-', $sourceName);

..would probably be the more efficient solution.