Question

Never seem to master those regex’s…

I need to update the total with newVal

<span class="myClass">some text Total (12)</span>

into

<span class="myClass">some text Total (13)</span>

and also without a current value

<span class="myClass">some text Total</span>

into

<span class="myClass">some text Total (13)</span>

oh, and some text can be anything

my code

    newVal = 13;
    $('.myClass').text( $('.myClass').text().replace(???, ???) );

Answer 1

Wrong approach, your code would only return the new string. To set it, use

$('.myClass').text(function(i, old){ 
   return old.replace(/(\s+\(\d+\))?$/, " ("+newVal+")");
})

The regex matches the string end, and (optionally) whitespaces + bracketed number before.