How to find a value in web page between square brackets using JQuery?

Question

I have the following scenario:

I have 5 possible values on a page:

[value 1]
...
[value 5]

What I want to do is grab each value and brackets...

Example Content:

<p>velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et 
dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, 
quis nostrum exercitationem ullam [value 1] corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi 
ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure 
reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate</p>

... and move to another part of the page, let's say in the header.

How hard is this?

Answer 1

If you don't need to know where it came from, you can use $('body').text() to get all the text off the website, and then regexp to find the elements.

var text = $('body').text();
var m = new Regexp('\[([^\]])+\]').exec();
$.each(m, function(index, value){
    //add value to header
}

Btw, this code is not tested, and on large sites this could take long. Try to narrow the scope as much as possible(by passing another element instead of body)

Answer 2

You could get the html contents, and do a regex on that string, or since you only have 5 possibilities, you could just do it the slower easier jQuery way:

var possibilities = ['[value 1]', '[value 2]', '[value 3]', '[value 4]', '[value 5]'];

for(var i in possibilities){
  if ( $(":contains('" + possibilities[i] + "')").length ) {
    alert(possibilities[i] + ' was found');
  }
}

This might be the most simple solution to follow, depending on how comfortable you are with different parts of jQuery and regex.