Re: Replacing string containing quotes

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Christian Perthen wrote:

I have a long string containing double and single quotes such as

"<a onclick="removeValue('Cuba')">Cuba</a>, <a
onclick="removeValue('Canada')">Canada</a>, <a class=a_small
onclick="removeValue('US')">US</a>"

How can I assigned it to a variable and then remove "<a
onclick="removeValue('Cuba')">Cuba</a>" part from it?


Here is an example that might do what you want or that you at could adapt to do what you want:

var string = "<a onclick=\"removeValue('Cuba')\">Cuba</a>, <a onclick=\"removeValue('Canada')\">Canada</a>, <a class=a_small onclick=\"removeValue('US')\">US</a>";

function removeOnclick (input, value) {
var onclickPattern = new RegExp('<a[^>]+onclick="removeValue\\(\'' + value + '\'\\)">' + value + '</a>', 'g');
return input.replace(onclickPattern, '');
}

alert(
removeOnclick(string, 'Cuba') + '\r\n\r\n' +
removeOnclick(string, 'Canada') + '\r\n\r\n' +
removeOnclick(string, 'US') + '\r\n\r\n'
);

So you need to use the RegExp constructor and pass in a string with the regular expression pattern as you obviously want to have a different expression depending on a function parameter (e.g. 'Cuba' or 'US').
And constructing regular expression patterns from strings is a tedious task as you need to take care of both string escape as well as regular expression escape mechanism so you end up with stuff like
'<a[^>]+onclick="removeValue\\(\''
above which needs to escape the single quote in the string with \' and needs to escape the backslash with \\ to ensure in the regular expression the parenthesis ( occurs escaped as \(.

--

	Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/
.

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