使用jQuery在XML标签内提取HTML字符串

Question

I've been working at this for a week and I'm stumped.

I'm trying to parse an RSS feed from SharePoint using jQuery. Using $.find works great on extracting the data between valid XML tags in the feed, but unfortunately one of the tags stores several HTML tags instead of the nice and clean strings like the others.

I have the tag extracted and stored as a string using the following:

$(xml).find("item").each(function () {
var description = $(this).find('description').text();
})

Which gives me the contents of the description tag:

<![CDATA[<div><b>Title:</b> Welcome!</div>
<div><b>Modified:</b> 6/10/2014 7:58 AM</div>
<div><b>Created:</b> 6/3/2014 2:55 PM</div>
<div><b>Created By:</b> John Smith</div>
<div><b>Modified By:</b> Samuel Smith</div>
<div><b>Version:</b> 1.0</div>
<div><b>AlertContent:</b> Stop the presses.</div>
<div><b>Team:</b> USA.</div>]]>

Now my problem is extracting and storing the useful bits. Is there a way to only extract the text following AlertContent:</b> ? It seems this might be possible using regular expressions, but I don't know how to make a filter that would start at the end of the bold tag and extend all the way until the start of the closing div tag. Or is there a better way through jQuery's methods?

Answer 1

Sure you're quite right; regular expressions can help you do that. Here is how you can do it:

var alertContent = description.replace(/^.*AlertContent:</b>([^<]*).*$/i, '$1');

WORKING JSFIDDLE DEMO

Answer 2

I'm sure you've heard the warnings about parsing xml with regex. Nevertheless, in case you'd like to know how to do it with regex, this simple pattern will do it:

AlertContent:<\/b>([^<]*)

• We start by matching AlertContent:</b>
• Then the negative character class [^<]* matches all characters that are not a < and the parentheses capture them to Group 1

All we need to do is read Group 1. Here is sample code to do it:

var regex = /AlertContent:<\/b>([^<]*)/;
var match = regex.exec(string);
if (match != null) {
    alert = match[1];
}