CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
Alvaro
Alvaro

Reputation: 41605

Getting functions content with regex

I'm trying to get the functions from an input string by using regular expressions.

So far, I managed to get the JavaScript kind of function declarations with the following regex:

/(\b(f|F)unction(.*?)\((.*?)\)\s*\{)/g

Which when applied like this, will return me whole declaration on the first index:

var re = /(\b(f|F)unction(.*?)\((.*?)\)\s*\{)/g;

while ((m = re.exec(text)) !== null) {
    //m[0] contains the function declaration
    declarations.push(m[0]);
}

Now, I would like to get in the returned match, the whole content of each of the functions so I can work with it later on (removed it, wrap it...)

I haven't managed to find a regext to do so, so far, I got this:

(\b(f|F)unction(.*?)\((.*?)\)\s*\{)(.*?|\n)*\}

But of course, it catches the first closing bracket } instead of the one at the end of each of the functions.

Any idea of how to get the closing } of each function?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 93

Answers (1)

Richard
Richard

Reputation: 109080

Any idea of how to get the closing } of each function?

This will be very hard with a regex. Because the function body can include any number of possibly nested brace pairs. And then consider strings containing unmatched braces in the function body.

To parse a non-regular language you need something more powerful than regular expressions: a parser for that language.

(Some regex variants have some ability to matched paired characters, but firstly JavaScript's regex engine isn't one; and secondly then there are those strings….)

Upvotes: 4

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