Question

So I have this string [14:42:49] Any Nick Name: Message bla bla and the only thing I want is Any Nick Name.

I was never really good at regex and I can’t remember how to get a specific part of the result. I came this far: /\[([0-9]{2}(:|\])){3} (.+):/g resulting in [14:42:49] Any Nick Name:.

Well sure I could remove the last and first part with substr and so on, but isn’t there an easier way ?

Answer 1

Your regexp is almost correct.

var regexp = /^\[\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}\] (.+):/;

This matches [xx:xx:xx] something: with x being digits. The ^ means that the string should start there, and \d means a digit. The g flag doesn’t add anything here.

Use .exec, and use [1] to get the first group (the characters matched inside the parens):

regexp.exec("[14:42:49] Any Nick Name: Message bla bla")[1];
// "Any Nick Name"