Question

Say I have an array of items I want to split on (this is for a page ).

I’m trying to ‘intelligently’ extract out a title, but only the relevant part.

I also dont want leading/trailing spaces.

I’m not quite sure how to go about doing this though.. without putting a bunch of loops inside of other loops.

function cleanTitle(title) {
    // Extract up to first delimiter
    var delims = ['|','·','-',':'];
} 

I am using jquery.

I also put the delims array in order of what I feel is most important. Instead of searching the entire title for the first array item before moving on to the next, I think it should do the entire string one letter at a time… each letter of the string it will check if its contained within that array. If not, it moves on. I know a lot of urls might contain even 3 out of all 4 of these, and then it wouldnt really work well otherwise.

Answer 1

You can use a regex to do the work for you:

var str = "This is a title-And the rest of the string";
var title;
var matchChar = str.match(/^(.*?)[|·\-:]/);
if (matchChar) {
    title = matchChar[1];   // "This is a title"
} else {
    title = str;
}

Working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/kxVMB/