Chunk ruby on rails text_field name with jQuery

Question

If I have a rails form that output the following HTML name attribute

"recipe[ingredients_attributes][1][quantities_attributes][0][measurement]"

How can I split this into chunks with jQuery, so I can manipulate the integers. I would like to avoid the use of a regular expression if possible.

I have a similar function for the rails form helper ID attributes which is as follows

function reindexQuantID(existing, parentIndex, index) {
    var str = existing.split('_');
    str[1] = parentIndex;
    str[3] = index;
    return str.join('_');
}

This one was easier because the characters are delimited by an _

Answer 1

The following uses regex:

var regex = new RegExp("\[[a-z0-9_]*\]", "g");
var array = existing.match(regex);
array[1] = "[42]";
array[3] = "[007]";
return array.join("");

# "recipe[ingredients_attributes][42][quantities_attributes][007][measurement]"

The array returned by the regex before manipulation is as follows:

["recipe[ingredients_attributes]", "[1]", "[quantities_attributes]", "[0]", "[measurement]"]

Please note that I'm not very experienced with regex, so there may be a better match, but the code works.

PS Just noticed Sparda's comment, that seems to do what you need.