Javascript Regex - Quotes to Parenthesis

Question

I\'d like to somehow replace the string sequence \"*\" with (*) using a regex in Javascript. Replacing things between quotes to be between opening and closing parenthesis.

Answer 1

Try something like:

str.replace(/"(.*?)"/g, function(_, match) { return "(" + match + ")"; })

Or more simply

str.replace(/"(.*?)"/g, "($1)")

Note the "non-greedy" specifier ?. Without this, the regexp will eat up everything including double quotes up until the last one in the input. See documentation here. The $1 in the second fragment is a back-reference referring the first parenthesized group. See documentation here.