Re: Finding text with RegEx

Hi Jang, It looks like they are confusing the \1 find operator with the $1 operator. In your example, you would use this for the replacement and it works:

var regex = /Fred([0-9])XXX/;
var string = "Fred2XXX";

alert (string.replace(regex, "Sam$1YYY"));

The \1, \2, etc. operators are used on the find side. For example, let's say I have this:

var string = "<p>This is a paragraph with <em>emphasized</em> text.</p>";
var regex = /<[^>]+>.+?<\/[^>]+>/;
alert (string.match (regex)[0]);

The alert gives me this:

<p>This is a paragraph with <em>emphasized</em>

I don't get a matching open and close tag. To insure that my close tag matches the open tag, I need to capture the open tag and use the \1 in the close tag to get a matched set.

var string = "<p>This is a paragraph with <em>emphasized</em> text.</p>";
var regex = /<([^>]+)>.+?<\/\1>/;
alert (string.match (regex)[0]);

Now I get this

<p>This is a paragraph with <em>emphasized</em> text.</p>

which is what I want.

-- Rick