Find bbtag pairs
A “bb-tag” looks like [tag]...[/tag]
, where tag
is one of: b
, url
or quote
.
For instance:
[b]text[/b]
[url]http://google.com[/url]
BB-tags can be nested. But a tag can’t be nested into itself, for instance:
Normal:
[url] [b]http://google.com[/b] [/url]
[quote] [b]text[/b] [/quote]
Can't happen:
[b][b]text[/b][/b]
Tags can contain line breaks, that’s normal:
[quote]
[b]text[/b]
[/quote]
Create a regexp to find all BB-tags with their contents.
For instance:
let regexp = /your regexp/flags;
let str = "..[url]http://google.com[/url]..";
alert( str.match(regexp) ); // [url]http://google.com[/url]
If tags are nested, then we need the outer tag (if we want we can continue the search in its content):
let regexp = /your regexp/flags;
let str = "..[url][b]http://google.com[/b][/url]..";
alert( str.match(regexp) ); // [url][b]http://google.com[/b][/url]
Opening tag is \[(b|url|quote)]
.
Then to find everything till the closing tag – let’s use the pattern .*?
with flag s
to match any character including the newline and then add a backreference to the closing tag.
The full pattern: \[(b|url|quote)\].*?\[/\1]
.
In action:
let regexp = /\[(b|url|quote)].*?\[\/\1]/gs;
let str = `
[b]hello![/b]
[quote]
[url]http://google.com[/url]
[/quote]
`;
alert( str.match(regexp) ); // [b]hello![/b],[quote][url]http://google.com[/url][/quote]
Please note that besides escaping [
, we had to escape a slash for the closing tag [\/\1]
, because normally the slash closes the pattern.