CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregex
Trash Can
Trash Can

Reputation: 6824

Markdown Editor With Regular Expressions Not Producing Desired Output

Please check out this codepen for a working code example

I have two regular expressions

//Matches ol:whatever: and turns it into <ol>whatever</ol>
var olRegex = /ol:[\s\r\f\n]?([\s\S\r\f\n]*)[\r\f\n]:/;

//Matches li:whatever: and turns it into <li>whatever</li>
var liRegex = /li:(.*):/gi;

If I type

ol:
li:This is item 1:
li:This is item 2:
:

It will be correctly replaced by this output

<ol>
    <li>This is item 1</li>
    <li>This is item 2</li>
</ol>

But if I add 2 blocks like this

ol:
li:This is item 1:
li:This is item 2:
:
ol:
li:This is item 1:
li:This is item 2:
:

It does not produce what I expects, it produces this output instead

<ol>
    <li>This is item 1</li>
    <li>This is item 2</li>
: // I want the olRegex to stop matching here

ol:
    <li>This is item 1</li>
    <li>This is item 2</li>
</ol>

I want it to output

<ol>
    <li>This is item 1</li>
    <li>This is item 2</li>
</ol>
<ol>
    <li>This is item 1</li>
    <li>This is item 2</li>
</ol>

My olRegex does not include the g flag, why doesn't it stop matching when it encounters that first : that stays on its own line?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 52

Answers (1)

grovesNL
grovesNL

Reputation: 6075

In the line var olRegex = /ol:[\s\r\f\n]?([\s\S\r\f\n]*)[\r\f\n]:/; the use of * will read characters matching [\s\S\r\f\n] as far as it until it finds the last possible [\r\f\n]: (greedy).

Instead of * you may use *? which attempts to match those characters as few times as possible (lazy).

By doing this with the g flag you will end up with the desired match groups.

Upvotes: 2

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