CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
Varol
Varol

Reputation: 1858

Regular Expression in Javascript to delimit words

I need to convert a text entered in a textarea, to a form like:

word1|word2|word3|word4|word5

How can i do this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 202

Answers (4)

Eric
Eric

Reputation: 6352

Try this...

var textAreaWords=textAreaNode.value.replace(/[^\w ]+/g,'').replace(/\s+/g,'|').split('|');

This will only keep the A-Za-z0-9_ characters as part of the first replace. The second replace turns all spaces/newlines/tabs into pipe characters. It will also convert multiple consecutive spaces into 1 pipe.

Upvotes: 1

xj9
xj9

Reputation: 3471

This should do the trick:

input = textarea.value.
    replace(/\b/g, '|'). // Replace word boundaries with '|'
    replace(/\s|[^a-zA-Z0-9\|]/g, ''). // Remove all non-alphanumeric chars
    replace(/\|{2,}/g, '|'). // Replace repetitions of '|' (like '||') with '|'
    replace(/^\||\|$/g, ''); // Remove extra '|' chars
array = input.split('|');

Upvotes: 2

kafuchau
kafuchau

Reputation: 5593

This should get rid of the tabs, spaces, etc (any unwanted whitespace), and replace them with a '|' character. And, the second replace will get rid of the non-alphanumeric and '|' characters. Then, you can split the text on the '|' to give you an array of the words.

var textIn= document.getElementById("myTextArea");
textIn.value = (textIn.value).replace(/\s+/g,'|').replace(/[^\w|]/g, '');
var textArr = textIn.value.split('|');

Also, if you don't want to actually replace the text in the textarea, you can store it to a var instead on the 2nd line of code.

Upvotes: 1

Chetan
Chetan

Reputation: 48059

Assuming the user enters the text into the textarea like this:

word1|word2|word3|word4|word5

and you store that in variable string userText, then use:

var textArray = userText.split('|');

Upvotes: 3

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