Question

I’m stumped! I’ve googled and read and read and read and I’m sure there is something really dumb that I’m doing wrong. This is from a Greasemonkey script that I can’t for the life of me get to initiate AND perform correctly. I’m trying to match this:

<a href="/browse/post/SOMETHING/">**SOMETHING** (1111)</a>

Here’s what I’m using:

var titleRegex = new RegExp("<a href=\"/browse/post/\d*/\">(.*) \(");

I’m sure I’m missing some kind of escape characters? But I just can’t figure it out so that Firefox doesn’t error out.

I generate the regexp using http://regexpal.com/ — In Firefox error console I receive “unterminated parenthetical”

Answer 1

When building a regex from a string instead of a regex literal, you need to double the backslashes.

Then, \d* only matches digits. I’m assuming that SOMETHING is just a placeholder, but if that were to contain anything but digits, it would fail.

Also, you should be using (.*?) (lazy) instead of (.*) (greedy), or you might be matching too much. Perhaps ([^(]*) would be even better.

Hard to say, though, without knowing more about the actual text you’re trying to match.

All in all:

var titleRegex = new RegExp("<a href=\"/browse/post/\\d*/\">([^(]*) \\(");