Question

I’ve got a string like this: 02-09-10, 20:19 (1 dagen geleden). I need the 1 inside the brackets. I used this regex:

myStr.replace(/(.+*)\(([0-9]{1,}) dagen geleden\)/i, '$2')

But that doesn’t work… What to do?

Regards, dodo

Answer 1

I’m not quite sure how I found myself back at this question, but I decided to expand on a point I made in the comments earlier. You’re using string.replace() where string.match() or regex.exec() would be more appropriate.

Furthermore, you can achieve your goal without even using regular expressions, which should be more efficient and more understandable if you’re not too savvy on regexes:

// The input string:
var myStr = "02-09-10, 20:19 (1 dagen geleden)";

// substring() would work just as well in place of slice() here:
alert(myStr.slice(
    // slice from the 1st character after the opening brace,
    myStr.indexOf("(")+1,
    // to the space just before "dagen"
    myStr.indexOf(" dagen")
));
// -> 1

In fact, the regular expression you came up with is so explicit, you could change the first argument of slice to a number you know:

myStr.slice(17, myStr.indexOf(" dagen"));
// -> 1