CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregexstringreplacesubstring
Duncan Walker
Duncan Walker

Reputation: 2201

Replacing specific characters in between substrings in Javascript

I have a string of HTML with handlebars like the following:

var text = '<p>This is the {{description}}</p><pre><code class="hljs">{{capitalize property}}</code></pre>'

I would like to search through the string and replace the handlebars brackets (i.e. { and }) with another character (in this case, a string that represents the html entity. For example, &#123; and &#125;, respectively) only when the handlebars are between opening and closing code tags (note, the tags can have a class).

Thus, the above string would look like this:

var text = '<p>This is the {{description}}</p><pre><code class="hljs">&#123;&#123;capitalize property&#125;&#125;</code></pre>'

Possible Options:

I understand I could append the string to the document and manipulate it with jQuery. I am also aware of the DOMparser() method.

Is there a simple way to achieve what I am trying, in Javascript? And would that method have major performance disadvantages?

My attempts have looked something like this:

string.replace(/<code[^>]*>({)<\/code>/g, '&#123;');

Upvotes: 0

Views: 132

Answers (1)

dereli
dereli

Reputation: 1864

Using regular expressions to parse HTML code can be really slow or result unexpected consequences.

Anyhow, this code tries to locate all <code> blocks and replaces {{ and }} with [[ and ]]. Code block can have multiple attributes.

text.replace(/<code(?:\s+[^>]+)*>(?:.*?{{.+?}})*.*<\/code>/g, function(a) {
    return(a.replace(/{{/g, "[[").replace(/}}/g, "]]"));
})

Upvotes: 1

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