regex replace only the first occurrence of every match

Question

How can I replace only the first occurrence of every match?

Example.

The following string

var toReplace='href="/3" href="/3/a" href="a/3" href="h/3/a/3/b"'

after replace should be like:

'href="*" href="*/a" href="*" href="*/a/3/b"'

I use this regex

toReplace.replace(/(href=")[^"]*(\/3)/,'$1*')

but the result is this:

'href="*" href="*/a"  href="*" href="*/b" '

The last href in that case becomes href="*/b" instead of href="*/a/3/b"

Any ideas?

Answer 1

[^"]* will try to match all possible matches.

Use non-greedy/lazy regex

/(href=")[^"]*?(\/3)/
              ^
              |

Regex Demo

 var toReplace = 'href="/3" href="/3/a" href="a/3" href="h/3/a/3/b"'; var replacedString = toReplace.replace(/(href=")[^"]*?(\\/3)/gi, '$1*'); document.write(replacedString);