JQuery: how to replace all between certain characters?

Question

I have searched for a general solution to this but only find answers to peoples specific questions.

Basically, I want to know how to generally use .replace() to repl

Answer 1

What you are looking for are called regular expressions. For more information, you can visit a site like: http://www.regular-expressions.info/

Note that regular expressions are not specific to JavaScript.

For your specific example:

string.replace(/abc.+xyz/,"abc"+newString+"xyz");

. means any character, and + means one or more occurences.

If you have more than one replacement to do, try:

string.replace(/abc.+?xyz/g,"abc"+newString+"xyz");

g stands for general, and ? is the lazy quantifier, meaning that it will stop at the next occurence of xyz in the string.

Answer 2

    String.prototype.replaceBetween = function(opentag, closetag, replacement) {
      var read_index = 0;
      var open_index = 0;
      var close_index = 0;
      var output = '';

      while ((open_index = this.indexOf(opentag, read_index)) != -1) {
        output += this.slice(read_index, open_index) + opentag;
        read_index = open_index + opentag.length;

        if ((close_index = this.indexOf(closetag, read_index)) != -1) {
          if (typeof replacement === 'function') {
            output += replacement(this.substring(open_index + opentag.length, close_index - 1)) + closetag;
          } else {
            output += replacement + closetag;
          }
          read_index = close_index + closetag.length;
        }
      }

      output += this.slice(read_index);

      return output
    };

    var mydiv = document.getElementById("mydiv");
    var html = mydiv.innerHTML;
    html = html.replaceBetween("<b>", "</b>", "hello");
    html = html.replaceBetween("<b>", "</b>", function(body) {
      return body + ' world';
    });
    mydiv.innerHTML = html;

<div id="mydiv">The begining...<b>for</b> and <b>bar</b>... the end.</div>