How to extract a string from a larger string?

Question

Using jQuery how would I find/extract the "Spartan" string if the outputted HTML page had the following..

<a href="/mytlnet/logout.php?t=e22df53bf4b5fc0a087ce48897e65ec0">
  <b>Logout</b>
</a> : Spartan<br>

Answer 1

Regular Expressions. Or by splitting the string in a more tedious fashion.

Since I'm not a big regex-junkie, I would likely get the text-equivalent using .text(), then split the result on ":", and grab the second index (which would be the 'Spartan' text).

Answer 2

if the pattern is going to be consistent you can your RegEx

or if the markup is going to be the same you can try the jQuery HTML Parser

Answer 3

As well as using regular expressions, I've also abusively used these functions to do the things it seems you want to do (strip html and such from a text string):

//removes all HTML tags
function striptags(stringToStrip) {
    return stringToStrip.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig,"");
}
//standard trim function for JavaScript--removes leading and trailing white space
function trim(stringToTrim) {
return stringToTrim.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,"");
}

Incredible regular expressions that have saved me a lot of time.