Getting text enclosed by curly brackets that also contain curly brackets in javascript

Question

I have a textarea that contains a text string, I am getting its value to a variable named updatestring . I am getting the text in this text area that's enclosed by update(){ and } . This text goes into the variable updatecode.

var updatestring = 'update(){\n//logic code here...\n\n\n}\n' ;
var updatecode = updatestring.match(/update\(\)\{([^}]+)\}/)[1];

The problem I have is that I want to be possible that the text enclosed by update(){ and } also contain the character } . In JavaScript, is there any easy way to do this without using a library?

Answer 1

Edit: torazaburo 's answer is better, but I'll leave this here to show another way just for educational purposes. ;)

Try this: /[^{]*{((?:.|\\r|\\n)*)}/

Example: https://regex101.com/r/QOIyvz/4

[^{]* - skips all characters until { is found and stops just before it.

{ - matches the first brace.

((?:.|\\r|\\n)*) - ?: starts a non-capturing group (will not be returned), and * "greedily" matches all characters and carriage return and line feeds, and makes them all part of a captured group (between the other ( and ) ) that is returned.

} - Regex will stop the greedy search to match the last one found.

Example: updatestring.match(/[^{]*{((?:.|\r|\n)*)}/)[1]

Answer 2

Greedy matching (which is the default behavior of * ) will skip over the intermediate } characters up to the last one, so nothing special is needed:

 var updatestring = 'update(){\\n//logic {embedded curly brackets}code here...\\n\\n\\n}\\n' ; var regexp = /{([^]*)}/; // ^ match starting curly // ^^^^^^ capture // ^^^ any character including newline // ^ any number of times // ^ match ending curly var regexp = result = updatestring.match(regexp)[1]; console.log(updatestring, result); 

The [^] will match everything including newlines.

By the way, why are you trying to parse something that looks like JavaScript using regexp?