regex - match exact text within square brackets

Question

I want to convert "categories": ["Doctors", "Health & Medical"],

to "categories": ["Doctors, Health & Medical"],

In otherwords, I want to find " ," (with space in the middle of open qoute and comma).

then replace with ,

However, " ," repeats elsewhere in the document therefore using " ," alone won't be enough. The best best is to say find " ," within [...]

For example: "categories": ["Doctors", "Health & Medical"], "city": "Phoenix", "count": 9

Thank you very much in advance

Answer 1

As pointed out in the comments, you should avoid regex if you can.

It is pretty trivial to achieve something like this in JavaScript with a single line.

For instance, you could just use the .join() method:

obj.categories = [obj.categories.join(', ')];

Example Here

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However, if you don't have a choice, you can use the following:

/((?:\[[^\]]*?)|(?:(?<!^)\G[^\]]*?))(?:", ")(?=[^\]]*"\])/g

Then replace the matches with \\1, .

Example Here

Based on your test cases, the string:

"categories": ["Doctors", "Health", "Other"], "city": "Phoenix", "count": 9

would output:

"categories": ["Doctors, Health, Other"], "city": "Phoenix", "count": 9