Question

Using the following text as my msg variable:

/private UserName:some message without leading whitespace
/private UserName: some message with leading whitespace

And the following javascript to parse it:

if(msg.indexOf('/private') == 0){
    msg = msg.substring(8,msg.length);
    var parts = msg.match(/\s+(.+?)\:\s*(.+?)/);

    alert("Name: " + parts[0]);
    alert("Message: " + parts[1]);
}

I would expect index 0 to contain UserName
and index 1 to contain some message with …

Anyone see what I’m missing?

Answer 1

Tweak your regex a little bit:

/^\/private\s+(.*?):\s*(.*?)$/

And simplify your code:

var regex = /^\/private\s+(.*?):\s*(.*?)$/;
var parts = regex.exec(msg);

if (parts){
    alert("Name: " + parts[1]);
    alert("Message: " + parts[2]);
}

parts[0] is the entire matched string. You want parts[1] and parts[2].