Question

Say I have an element in my HTML page like so:

<span class="special caption['This &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; describes this element.']">ABC</span>

I’d like to use jQuery to extract this “caption” from the class attribute. I know how to isolate

caption['This <em>expression</em> describes this element.']

but what regular expression could let me extract

This <em>expression</em> describes this element.

?

Bonus points if I can incorporate an escape sequence for the apostrophe, e.g.

caption['This <em style=\'color: #FF0000;\'>expression</em> describes this element.']

and get

This <em style=’color: #FF0000;’>expression</em> describes this ‘element.’

Thanks for all your help. I’m really challenged at regular expressions….

Answer 1

You probably shouldn’t be putting this info into the class attribute (see locrizak’s answer), but if you absolutely have to for some reason, read on.

I don’t think you need a regular expression. If you already know how to get it down to this:

caption['This <em>expression</em> describes this element.']

…then all you need to do is take that string and substring it, like so:

var s = "caption['This <em>expression</em> describes this element.']";
s = s.substring(9, s.length - 2);