Question

I’m trying to match a string that contains HTML code that contains parameters to a function in Javascript.

There are several of these functions found in the the string containing the HTML code.

changeImg('location','size');

Let’s say that I want to grab the location within the single quotes, how would I go about doing this? There are more than one instance in the string.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This is a fairly common question on SO and the answer is always the same: regular expressions are a poor tool for parsing HTML. Use an XML or HTML parser. That’s what they’re for. Take a look at Parse HTML With PHP And DOM for an example and Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way for a bit of background.

Parsing Javascript is even harder as it can appear inside <script> tags and attributes so in the very least you’d need to get every <script> tag and parse the contents as well as every element and parse their event handlers (onclick, etc).

I’m reminded of this quote:

“Some people, when confronted with a
problem, think “I know, I’ll use
regular expressions.” Now they have
two problems.” — Jamie Zawinski