Question

This is probably a simple one but I’m very much a regex novice.

I’m looking to select the first line of every paragraph within a textarea on a page using a regular expression. After thinking I was there I have hit a problem.

Using http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ I came up with this:

/\r\r.*\r/g

but then I place that into my javascript and ran it on the page:

var headingsArr = document.getElementById("text").value.match(/\r\r.*\r/g);

and the array returns null.

Have I got the regular expression right and if so where am I going wrong when using it in my javascript!?

Thank you

Answer 1

This depends on what your newline characters are. I think you may better go for

/(?:\r\n|[\r\n]){2}.*(?:\r\n|[\r\n])/g

I know in Regexr only a \r is a newline. But in Windows normally \r\n is used, but under .*ix its normally only the \n.

So (?:\r\n|[\r\n]) is an alternation, it tries at first to match \r\n if this is not found it matches either \r or \n.