Question

I’ve a string done like this: “http://something.org/dom/My_happy_dog_%28is%29cool!”

How can I remove all the initial domain, the multiple underscore and the percentage stuff?

For now I’m just doing some multiple replace, like

str = str.replace("http://something.org/dom/","");
str = str.replace("_%28"," ");

and go on, but it’s really ugly.. any help?

Thanks!

EDIT:

the exact input would be “My happy dog is cool!” so I would like to get rid of the initial address and remove the underscores and percentage and put the spaces in the right place!

The problem is that trying to put a regex on Chrome “something goes wrong”. Is it a problem of Chrome or my regex?

Answer 1

I’d suggest:

var str =  "http://something.org/dom/My_happy_dog_%28is%29cool!";
str.substring(str.lastIndexOf('/')+1).replace(/(_)|(%\d{2,})/g,' ');

JS Fiddle demo.

The reason I took this approach is that RegEx is fairly expensive, and is often tricky to fine tune to the point where edge-cases become less troublesome; so I opted to use simple string manipulation to reduce the RegEx work.

Effectively the above creates a substring of the given str variable, from the index point of the lastIndexOf('/') (which does exactly what you’d expect) and adding 1 to that so the substring is from the point after the / not before it.

The regex: (_) matches the underscores, the | just serves as an or operator and the (%\d{2,}) serves to match digit characters that occur twice in succession and follow a % sign.

The parentheses surrounding each part of the regex around the |, serve to identify matching groups, which are used to identify what parts should be replaced by the ' ' (single-space) string in the second of the arguments passed to replace().

References:

• lastIndexOf().
• replace().
• substring().