Regex, match everything, except double asterisks

Question

I am creating a text editor interface where the user is able to format the text, and he can see the modifications in a div next to it.

To highlight a bunch of text, I reserved double asterisks as the following ** text **, just like here in stackoverflow.

My code looks like the following:

replace(/\*{2}([^\*]*)\*{2}/g, "<strong>$1</strong>")

but my problem is, if the text is including an asterisk, the following output can be seen:

** text* **,

and not text*

how is it possible to negate double characters for matching to not break the HTML tag in the output?

Answer 1

You can deal with single asterisks followed by at least one other character just adding (?:\\*[^*]+)* :

yourstr = yourstr.replace(/\*\*([^*]*(?:\*[^*]+)*)\*\*/g, "<strong>$1</strong>");

Note that escaping * in a character class is useless, and writing \\*{2} is longer than \\*\\* .