Question

Unfortunately, despite having tried to learn regex at least one time a year for as many years as I can remember, I always forget as I use them so infrequently. This year my new year’s resolution is to not try and learn regex again – So this year to save me from tears I’ll give it to Stack Overflow. (Last Christmas remix).

I want to pass in a string in this format {getThis}, and be returned the string getThis. Could anyone be of assistance in helping to stick to my new year’s resolution?

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Answer 1

If your string will always be of that format, a regex is overkill:

>>> var g='{getThis}'; >>> g.substring(1,g.length-1) 'getThis' 

substring(1 means to start one character in (just past the first {) and ,g.length-1) means to take characters until (but not including) the character at the string length minus one. This works because the position is zero-based, i.e. g.length-1 is the last position.

For readers other than the original poster: If it has to be a regex, use /{([^}]*)}/ if you want to allow empty strings, or /{([^}]+)}/ if you want to only match when there is at least one character between the curly braces. Breakdown:

• /: start the regex pattern
  • {: a literal curly brace
    • (: start capturing
      • [: start defining a class of characters to capture
        • ^}: ‘anything other than }‘
      • ]: OK, that’s our whole class definition
      • *: any number of characters matching that class we just defined
    • ): done capturing
  • }: a literal curly brace must immediately follow what we captured
• /: end the regex pattern