Regular Expressions - Javascript - Single Quotes

Question

Lets assume we have a couple variables. A. Str, a string, John's .... B. regex expression as shown below.

inner.Html DOES have John's in it.

What I dont get, is this code for regex never works when I have a str with a single quote in it. Any ideas?

var str = "John's"   
var regex = new RegExp("\>[^\<]+?(" + str  +")[^\>]+?\<", "gi");
var thismatch = regex.exec(this.innerHTML);

Answer 1

I am not sure about what your outer element looks like, but one main thing missing and the reason why your regex will not work when str has a single quote is because you need to escape the quote in the string.

var str = "John's".replace(/(\')/g, '\\$1'); // "John\'s";
var regex = new RegExp("\>[^\<]+?(" + str  +")[^\>]+?\<", "gi");
var thismatch = regex.exec(this.innerHTML);