[thelist] Regular Expression - Is it a bug or am I missing something very obvious?
VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK
volkan.ozcelik at gmail.com
Wed Mar 9 22:46:14 CST 2005
Hi Community, hi RegExp lovers!
Regarding the following js reg exp.
/<\/?(?!(p))/ig; (It's a simplified version of what I'm working on)
I think what it is supposed to do is:
1. match character < literally
2. match craracter / literally (zero or one times)
3. If there is a p immediately after do not match anything, just
rollback (i.e. negative lookahead)
so the code below
var strTest1 = "</p>";
var regEx1 = /<\/?(?!(p))/ig;
strTest1 = strTest1.replace(regEx1,"")
alert(strTest1);
should alert "</p>".
Well it doesn't. It alerts "p/>". Which means that it has found a match.
I need to swap things around to make it work:
var strTest2 = "</p>";
regEx2 = /<(?!(\/p|p))/ig;
strTest2 = strTest2.replace(regEx2,"")
alert(strTest2);
but why on earth do I need to make things unnecessarily complicated ?!
The first one should work at least according to my humble logic!
Is it a bug? Or am I missing a really simple thing?
Please help me before I split this PC with an axe.
TIA,
Volkan.
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