CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregexpattern-matching
ronline
ronline

Reputation: 2411

Extract numbers between two patterns javascript

I am trying to extract a set of numbers from a url. The string is betwen the word "region" and word "all". The url is : http://my.site.com/theme/feature/region/227-84/all/country-south

The regular expression which I have built is :

var tmp = $(this).attr('link').match("(?=region/).*?(?=/all)");

The regex is extracting the correct portion of numbers but is always sticking the region to numbers so the extracted string become :

"region/227-84"

While I wannt to get only the numbers:

"227-84"

Upvotes: 1

Views: 146

Answers (2)

Jorge Luis Palacios Mata
Jorge Luis Palacios Mata

Reputation: 1

If you already know that the size of the string you are looking for you could do this: 

......(?=\/all)

Upvotes: 0

Josh Crozier
Josh Crozier

Reputation: 240938

It's including the substring "region/" because the positive lookahead (?=region\/) is matching the character before "region/". Since JavaScript doesn't have lookbehinds, the easiest option would be to remove the lookaheads and use a capturing group in order to extract the middle portion:

/region\/([^\/]*)\/all/

or if there are slashes between the patterns:

/region\/(.*?)\/all/

Usage:

var match = $(this).attr('link').match(/region\/([^\/]*)\/all/);
var result = match ? match[1] : null;

console.log(result); // "227-84"

If there is a match, the .match() method returns an array. In this case it would return:

["region/227-84/all", "227-84"] // match

The first capturing group has an index of one (i.e., match ? match[1] : null). In this case, the ternary operator is simply used to check if there was actually a match before accessing the array (otherwise an error would be thrown if there wasn't a match).

Upvotes: 1

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