Question

I’m stuck. I tried it with regular expressions, but I guess I’m missing something. I’m working with JavaScript.

I have an input like:

(text [number]) the text that follows...

I want an output like:

[number] the text that follows...

I tried it with substr, but my problem is that I do not know the length of the text or number in the brackets. I guess I need the position of the beginning and ending of the number to work with a regEx.

Have you got an idea?

Answer 1

Regexes are the way to go — using JavaScript’s replace function, you don’t need to fiddle with the position of the number in the string.

Try this:

var geoff = '(text 694) the text that follows...';
var geoff_replaced = geoff.replace(/\([^0-9]* ([0-9]*)\)/, '$1');

# geoff_replaced will be "694 the text that follows...

I don’t do much JavaScript regex stuff, so I totally looked up the above on this guide to JavaScript regexes:

• http://www.evolt.org/node/36435