CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
CMS
CMS

Reputation: 285

Regex - PHP to Javascript

I have the following regex:

<div\s*class="selectionDescription">(.*?)<\/div>

Which works with PHP perfectly. I am aware that javascript does not support the \s flag.

I have tried using the \g flag, however my pattern is not matched.

I am looking to match everything inside the div in the following string:

<div class="selectionDescription">Text to match</div>

I receive the following error in javascript:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid flags supplied to RegExp constructor 's'(…)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 83

Answers (2)

OnlineCop
OnlineCop

Reputation: 4069

If you are spanning multiple lines, and you mean the single line mode that s provides, you can emulate that with [\S\s] or some other similar "all inclusive, all exclusive" style: [\d\D], [\W\w], etc.

That will allow it to span multiple lines and still match:

<div\s*class="selectionDescription">([\S\s]*?)<\/div>

You need to be wary of using lazy *? quantifiers, however. Take a look at https://regex101.com/r/xD2jV8/1 where the number of steps is 220.

If the content between <div> and </div> tags is very large, this becomes very computationally expensive, very fast.

While slightly less readable,

<div\s*class="selectionDescription">((?:[^<]+|<(?!\/div>))*)<\/div>

would do the same but within only 69 steps.

And at that point, https://regex101.com/r/xD2jV8/3 slightly optimizes it further, but HTML really isn't the best way to handle things with HTML. jQuery could perform this quickly and much "safer": $('div.selectionDescription').html()

Of course, you may not have access to this at this point, but HTML is usually not the best thing to use for parsing HTML.

Upvotes: 2

xyhhx
xyhhx

Reputation: 6664

Your pattern seems to work.

s is not a flag, so if you are trying something like new RegExp('<div\s*class="selectionDescription">(.*?)<\/div>', 's') then yes, you would find an error.

You do not need to add any flags, except perhaps the g flag to capture this div many times. (Check it out)

Maybe check out a quick primer on Javascript's regular expressions?

Upvotes: 2

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