Develop Reference

Why is JavaScript's split() method not splitting on ":"?

So to start off, a bit of context. I am pulling data from the following url: "https://webster.cs.washington.edu/pokedex/pokedex.php?pokedex=all" using a GET method. The data returned is a series of Pokemon names and image names in the following format.
Name1:name1.png
Name2:name2.png
...
The list is 151 items long. When I call the typeOf() method "String" is returned, so I am fairly certain it is a String I am dealing with here. What I would like to do is split the String on the delimiters of "\n" and ":".
What I would like:
Name1,name1.png,Name2,name2.png...
After some experimentation with Regex, I found that the Regex to do this was "\n|:". Using this I wrote the following line to split the String apart. I tested this Regex on https://regex101.com and it seems to work properly there.
var splitData = data.split("\n|:");
("data" is the String I receive from the url.)
But instead of splitting the String and placing the substrings into an array it doesn't do anything. (At least as far as I can see.) As such my next idea was to try replacing the characters that were giving me trouble with another character and then splitting on that new character.
data = data.replace("\n", " ");
data = data.replace("/:/g", " ");
var splitData = data.split(" ");
The first line that replaces new line characters does work, but the second line to replace the ":" does not seem to do anything. So I end up with an array that is filled with Strings that look like this.
Name1:name1.png
I can split these strings by calling their index and then splitting the substring stored within, which only confuses me more.
data = data.replace("\n", " ");
var splitData = data.split(" ");
alert(splitData[0].split(":")[1]);
The above code returns "name1.png".
Am I missing something regarding the split() method? Is my Regex wrong? Is there a better way to achieve what I am attempting to do?

Right now you are splitting on the string literal "\n|:" but to do a regex you want data.split(/[:\n]/)
The MDN page shows two ways to build a Regex:
var regex1 = /\w+/;
var regex2 = new RegExp('\\w+');

The following test script was able to work for me. I decided to use the regex in the split instead of trying to replace tokens in the string. It seemed to do the trick for me.
let testResponse = `Abra:abra.png
Aerodactyl:aerodactyl.png`;
let dataArray = testResponse.split(/\n|:/g);
let commaSeperated = dataArray.join(',');
console.log(commaSeperated);

So you can simply use regex by excluding the quotes all together.
You can look at the documentation here for regular expressions. They give the following examples:
var re = /ab+c/;
var re = new RegExp('ab+c');
See below for your expected output:
var data = `Name1:name1.png
Name2:name2.png`;
var splitData = data.split(/[\n:]/);
console.log(splitData);
//Join them by a comma to get all results
console.log(splitData.join(','));
//For some nice key value pairs, you can reduce the array into an object:
var kvps = data.split("\n").reduce((res, line) => {
var split = line.split(':');
return {
...res,
[split[0]]: split[1]
};
}, {});
console.log(kvps);

I tried and this works good.
str.split(/[:\n]/)
Here is a plunker.
plunker

Match a string between two other strings with regex in javascript

How can I use regex in javascript to match the phone number and only the phone number in the sample string below? The way I have it written below matches "PHONE=9878906756", I need it to only match "9878906756". I think this should be relatively simple, but I've tried putting negating like characters around "PHONE=" with no luck. I can get the phone number in its own group, but that doesn't help when assigning to the javascript var, which only cares what matches.
REGEX:
/PHONE=([^,]*)/g
DATA:
3={STATE=, SSN=, STREET2=, STREET1=, PHONE=9878906756,
MIDDLENAME=, FIRSTNAME=Dexter, POSTALCODE=, DATEOFBIRTH=19650802,
GENDER=0, CITY=, LASTNAME=Morgan

The way you're doing it is right, you just have to get the value of the capture group rather than the value of the whole match:
var result = str.match(/PHONE=([^,]*)/); // Or result = /PHONE=([^,]*)/.exec(str);
if (result) {
console.log(result[1]); // "9878906756"
}
In the array you get back from match, the first entry is the whole match, and then there are additional entries for each capture group.
You also don't need the g flag.

Just use dataAfterRegex.substring(6) to take out the first 6 characters (i.e.: the PHONE= part).

Try
var str = "3={STATE=, SSN=, STREET2=, STREET1=, PHONE=9878906756, MIDDLENAME=, FIRSTNAME=Dexter, POSTALCODE=, DATEOFBIRTH=19650802, GENDER=0, CITY=, LASTNAME=Morgan";
var ph = str.match(/PHONE\=\d+/)[0].slice(-10);
console.log(ph);

How to compare two Strings and get Different part

now I have two strings,
var str1 = "A10B1C101D11";
var str2 = "A1B22C101D110E1";
What I intend to do is to tell the difference between them, the result will look like
A10B1C101D11
A10 B22 C101 D110E1
It follows the same pattern, one character and a number. And if the character doesn't exist or the number is different between them, I will say they are different, and highlight the different part. Can regular expression do it or any other good solution? thanks in advance!

Let me start by stating that regexp might not be the best tool for this. As the strings have a simple format that you are aware of it will be faster and safer to parse the strings into tokens and then compare the tokens.
However you can do this with Regexp, although in javascript you are hampered by the lack of lookbehind.
The way to do this is to use negative lookahead to prevent matches that are included in the other string. However since javascript does not support lookbehind you might need to go search from both directions.
We do this by concatenating the strings, with a delimiter that we can test for.
If using '|' as a delimiter the regexp becomes;
/(\D\d*)(?=(?:\||\D.*\|))(?!.*\|(.*\d)?\1(\D|$))/g
To find the tokens in the second string that are not present in the first you do;
var bothstring=str2.concat("|",str1);
var re=/(\D\d*)(?=(?:\||\D.*\|))(?!.*\|(.*\d)?\1(\D|$))/g;
var match=re.exec(bothstring);
Subsequent calls to re.exec will return later matches. So you can iterate over them as in the following example;
while (match!=null){
alert("\""+match+"\" At position "+match.index);
match=re.exec(t);
}
As stated this gives tokens in str2 that are different in str1. To get the tokens in str1 that are different use the same code but change the order of str1 and str2 when you concatenate the strings.
The above code might not be safe if dealing with potentially dirty input. In particular it might misbehave if feed a string like "A100|A100", the first A100 will not be considered as having a missing object because the regexp is not aware that the source is supposed to be two different strings. If this is a potential issue then search for occurences of the delimiting character.

You call break the string into an array
var aStr1 = str1.split('');
var aStr2 = str2.split('');
Then check which one has more characters, and save the smaller number
var totalCharacters;
if(aStr1.length > aStr2.length) {
totalCharacters = aStr2.length
} else {
totalCharacters = aStr1.length
}
And loop comparing both
var diff = [];
for(var i = 0; i<totalCharacters; i++) {
if(aStr1[i] != aStr2[i]) {
diff.push(aStr1[i]); // or something else
}
}
At the very end you can concat those last characters from the bigger String (since they obviously are different from the other one).
Does it helps you?

Regex one-liner for splitting string at nth character where n is a variable length

I've found a few similar questions, but none of them are clean one-liners, which I feel should be possible. I want to split a string at the last instance of specific character (in my case .).
var img = $('body').attr('data-bg-img-url'); // the string http://sub.foo.com/img/my-img.jpg
var finalChar = img.split( img.split(/[.]+/).length-1 ); // returns int 3 in above string example
var dynamicRegex = '/[.$`finalChar`]/';
I know I'm breaking some rules here, wondering if someone smarter than me knows the correct way to put that together and compress it?
EDIT - The end goal here is to split and store http://sub.foo.com/img/my-img and .jpg as separate strings.

In regex, .* is greedy, meaning it will match as much as possible. Therefore, if you want to match up to the last ., you could do:
/^.*\./
And from the looks, you are trying to get the file extension, so you would want to add capture:
var result = /^.*\.(.*)$/.exec( str );
var extension = result[1];
And for both parts:
var result = /^(.*)\.(.*)$/.exec( str );
var path = result[1];
var extension = result[2];

You can use the lastIndexOf() method on the period and then use the substring method to obtain the first and second string. The split() method is better used in a foreach scenario where you want to split at all instances. Substring is preferable for these types of cases where you are breaking at a single instance of the string.

Splitting string in javascript

How can I split the following string?
var str = "test":"abc","test1":"hello,hi","test2":"hello,hi,there";
If I use str.split(",") then I won't be able to get strings which contain commas.
Whats the best way to split the above string?

I assume it's actually:
var str = '"test":"abc","test1":"hello,hi","test2":"hello,hi,there"';
because otherwise it wouldn't even be valid JavaScript.
If I had a string like this I would parse it as an incomplete JSON which it seems to be:
var obj = JSON.parse('{'+str+'}');
and then use is as a plain object:
alert(obj.test1); // says: hello,hi
See DEMO
Update 1: Looking at other answers I wonder whether it's only me who sees it as invalid JavaScript?
Update 2: Also, is it only me who sees it as a JSON without curly braces?

Though not clear with your input. Here is what I can suggest.
str.split('","');
and then append the double quotes to each string

str.split('","'); Difficult to say given the formatting
if Zed is right though you can do this (assuming the opening and closing {)
str = eval(str);
var test = str.test; // Returns abc
var test1 = str.test1; // returns hello,hi
//etc

That's a general problem in all languages: if the items you need contain the delimiter, it gets complicated.
The simplest way would be to make sure the delimiter is unique. If you can't do that, you will probably have to iterate over the quoted Strings manually, something like this:
var arr = [];
var result = text.match(/"([^"]*"/g);
for (i in result) {
arr.push(i);
}

Iterate once over the string and replace commas(,) following a (") and followed by a (") with a (%) or something not likely to find in your little strings. Then split by (%) or whatever you chose.