How to get text between two characters?

Question

|text to get| Other text.... migh have "|"'s ...

How can I get the text to get stuff from the string (and remove it)?

It should be just the first match

Answer 1

var test_str = "|text to get| Other text.... migh have \"|\"'s ...";
var start_pos = test_str.indexOf('|') + 1;
var end_pos = test_str.indexOf('|',start_pos);
var text_to_get = test_str.substring(start_pos,end_pos)
alert(text_to_get);

Answer 2

You don't need a regular expression for this; firing up the regex engine is completely overkill for such a simple task.

Just use basic string manipulation:

function getSubStr(str, delim) {
    var a = str.indexOf(delim);

    if (a == -1)
       return '';

    var b = str.indexOf(delim, a+1);

    if (b == -1)
       return '';

    return str.substr(a+1, b-a-1);
    //                 ^    ^- length = gap between delimiters
    //                 |- start = just after the first delimiter
}

print(getSubStr('|text to get| Other text.... migh have "|"s ...', '|'));

// Output: text to get

Live demo.

Answer 3

To get it:

"|text to get| Other text.... migh have \"|\"'s ...".match(/\|(.*?)\|/)

To remove it:

"|text to get| Other text.... migh have \"|\"'s ...".replace(/\|(.*?)\|/, "")

I'm not the expert on Regex so if someone has improvements, please edit.

Answer 4

string = '|text to get| Other text.... migh have "|"\'s ...';
string = string.replace(/^\|[^|]*\|/, '');

Answer 5

You'll have to get the text you want by using match , then run replace with it:

var text = "|text to get| Other text.... migh have \"|\"'s ...";
text.replace(text.match(/\|([^|]*)\|/)[1], "");

Answer 6

you should look up the following functions:

split()
substr()

Depending on how you want to solve your task either can be used.