Question

Say I have the string Hello {{name}}, how are you doing today? I’m trying to grab name from that string.

So far, I have /\{{2}[a-z0-9]*\}{2}/gi. The problem, is, it grabs {{name}} and not name. Without the global flag it works fine, but I’m trying to get every instance of words within double brackets, so it’s not quite right… I’m no RegEx pro so I’m hoping someone can help me out…

Answer 1

The best solution would be to use lookaround assertions so the {{ and }} don’t get picked up, however JavaScript regex doesn’t support lookbehind, it only supports lookahead.

So one alternative is to place your text in a capture group and grab what’s inside:

/\{{2}([a-z0-9]*)\}{2}/gi

To get every capture, make a RegExp object with your regex, and iterate through the results of its exec() function. For example:

var str = 'Hello {{name}}, how are you doing {{date}}?';
var re = /\{{2}([a-z0-9]*)\}{2}/gi;
var words = [];
var match;

while (match = re.exec(str)) {
    words.push(match[1]);
}

jsFiddle sample

Or as Gumbo suggests in his comment, manually strip out the {{ and }} from your array of matches.