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javascriptregex
Attila Olah
Attila Olah

Reputation: 19

Javascript regex match only inside parenthesis

I have an data.url string. I want to get some data from it with the following regex

    var filename = data.url.match(/file=(.+)&/gi);

All I want is the data inside the parenthesis -a file name actually- but what I get back is "file=example.jpg&". Why is this happening? Shouldn't only the the matches found in the parentheses be returned? How can I get rid of those unnecessary characters? Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1399

Answers (2)

Stephan Kulla
Stephan Kulla

Reputation: 5067

Use

var filename = data.url.match(/file=([^&]+)/i)[1];

Example:

"file=example.jpg".match(/file=([^&]+)/i)[1] == "example.jpg"
"file=example.jpg&b=ttt&c=42".match(/file=([^&]+)/i)[1] == "example.jpg"
"http://example.com/index.php?file=example.jpg&b=ttt&c=42".match(/file=([^&]+)/i)[1] == "example.jpg"

match() returns an array with the first searched group at the second place, i.e. at match(...)[1].

Note: The result of the above code will be a String. If you still want to have a singleton array with your filename as the only element, then you should take the solution of @Sabuj Hassan.

Upvotes: 1

Sabuj Hassan
Sabuj Hassan

Reputation: 39355

Javascript returns both the whole matched pattern(usually known as group-0) along with the other matched groups. You can use this one:

var filename = /file=(.+)&/gi.exec(data.url).slice(1);

Upvotes: 2

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