Question

I’m not sure if count is the right word to use because it doesn’t really matter to me how many there are, but let me explain. My data will be formatted like this: (hi,(1,2),hey),(yo,(3,(rawr),4),howdy) and I have no control over how many dimensions there are. And I want to grab the lowest groups
["hi", Array[], "hey"] and ["yo", Array[], "howdy"] So if there was a way to “count” I could count the open parenthesis, and then count the closed ones and when it hits 0, that’s when the regex ends. For example:

(hi,(1,2),hey),(yo,(3,(rawr),4),howdy)
1---2---1----0-1---2--3----2--1------0

Now with that being said, I don’t believe counting is possible but what I want is a subsitute solution. This is what I have so far /\([^\(]*?\)/ but that only returns the highest level group from each of the low-level groups aka (1,2) and (rawr).

Answer 1

You can use a stack to track the (and).

Array.reduce(
    '(hi,(1,2),hey),(yo,(3,(rawr),4),howdy)',
    function(x,y){
        if(y=='(')
            return [x[0]+1, x[1]+(x[0]+1)]
        else if(y==')')
            return [x[0]-1, x[1]+(x[0]-1)]
        else
            return [x[0], x[1]+'-']
    },
    [0,'']
)[1]

Try it in firebug console.