Develop Reference

I need match string in quotes

I need to match string within "" , I'm using following it's not working
var str='"hi" hello "abc\nddk" ef "gh"';
console.log(str.match(/(?=")[^"]*?(?=")/));
t's giving me output as
[]
I need output as
["hi", "abc\nddk", "gh"]
Update :
I can use regex "[^"]" to match string in quotes but I need to avoid the " from the result

Simplest way would be to do:
/"[^"]*?"/g
This will return an array with "hi", "abc\nddk" and "gh" and you can do something like piece.replace(/"/g, "") on individual pieces to get rid of the ". If you don't like that then rather than do a match you can do a search and don't replace
var matches = [];
str.replace(/"([^"]*?)"/g, function (_, match) {
matches.push(match);
});

This should do the trick:
/(?| (")((?:\\"|[^"])+)\1 | (')((?:\\'|[^'])+)\1 )/xg
Demo
BTW: regex101.com is a great resource to use (which is where I got the regex above)
Update
The first one I posted works for PHP, here is one for JS
/"([^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*)"|\w+|'([^'\\]*(?:\\.[^'\\]*)*)'/g

Maybe I read your question incorrectly but this is working for me
/\".+\"/gm
https://regex101.com/r/wF0yN4/1

Replace .split() with .match() using regex in javascript

I'm having difficulties with constructing some regular expressions using Javascript.
What I need:
I have a string like: Woman|{Man|Boy} or {Girl|Woman}|Man or Woman|Man etc.
I need to split this string by '|' separator, but I don't want it to be split inside curly brackets.
Examples of strings and desired results:
// Expample 1
string: 'Woman|{Man|Boy}'
result: [0] = 'Woman', [1] = '{Man|Boy}'
// Example 2
string '{Woman|Girl}|{Man|Boy}'
result: [0] = '{Woman|Girl}', [1] = '{Man|Boy}'
I can't change "|" symbol to another inside the brackets because the given strings are the result of a recursive function. For example, the original string could be
'Nature|Computers|{{Girls|Women}|{Boys|Men}}'

try this:
var reg=/\|(?![^{}]+})/g;
Example results:
var a = 'Woman|{Man|Boy}';
var b = '{Woman|Girl}|{Man|Boy}';
a.split(reg)
["Woman", "{Man|Boy}"]
b.split(reg)
["{Woman|Girl}", "{Man|Boy}"]
for your another question:
"Now I have another, but a bit similar problem. I need to parse all containers from the string. Syntax of the each container is {sometrash}. The problem is that container can contain another containers, but I need to parse only "the most relative" container. mystring.match(/\{+.+?\}+/gi); which I use doesn't work correctly. Could you correct this regex, please? "
you can use this regex:
var reg=/\{[^{}]+\}/g;
Example results:
var a = 'Nature|Computers|{{Girls|Women}|{Boys|Men}}';
a.match(reg)
["{Girls|Women}", "{Boys|Men}"]

You can use
.match(/[^|]+|\{[^}]*\}/g)
to match those. However, if you have a nesting of arbitrary depth then you'll need to use a parser, [javascript] regex won't be capable of doing that.

Test this:
([a-zA-Z0-9]*\|[a-zA-Z0-9]*)|{[a-zA-Z0-9]*\|[a-zA-Z0-9]*}

Need a regex that finds "string" but not "[string]"

I'm trying to build a regular expression that parses a string and skips things in brackets.
Something like
string = "A bc defg hi [hi] jkl mnop.";
The .match() should return "hi" but not [hi]. I've spent 5 hours running through RE's but I'm throwing in the towel.
Also this is for javascript or jquery if that matters.
Any help is appreciated. Also I'm working on getting my questions formatted correctly : )
EDIT:
Ok I just had a eureka moment and figured out that the original RegExp I was using actually did work. But when I was replaces the matches with the [matches] it simply replaced the first match in the string... over and over. I thought this was my regex refusing to skip the brackets but after much time of trying almost all of the solutions below, I realized that I was derping Hardcore.
When .replace was working its magic it was on the first match, so I quite simply added a space to the end of the result word as follows:
var result = string.match(regex);
var modifiedResult = '[' + result[0].toString() + ']';
string.replace(result[0].toString() + ' ', modifiedResult + ' ');
This got it to stop targeting the original word in the string and stop adding a new set of brackets to it with every match. Thank you all for your help. I am going to give answer credit to the post that prodded me in the right direction.

preprocess the target string by removing everything between brackets before trying to match your RE
string = "A bc defg hi [hi] jkl mnop."
tmpstring = string.replace(/\[.*\]/, "")
then apply your RE to tmpstring
correction: made the match for brackets eager per nhahtd comment below, and also, made the RE global
string = "A bc defg hi [hi] jkl mnop."
tmpstring = string.replace(/\[.*?\]/g, "")

You don't necessarily need regex for this. Simply use string manipulation:
var arr = string.split("[");
var final = arr[0] + arr[1].split("]")[1];
If there are multiple bracketed expressions, use a loop:
while (string.indexOf("[") != -1){
var arr = string.split("[");
string = arr[0] + arr.slice(1).join("[").split("]").slice(1).join("]");
}

Using only Regular Expressions, you can use:
hi(?!])
as an example.
Look here about negative lookahead: http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html
Unfortunately, javascript does not support negative lookbehind.
I used http://regexpal.com/ to test, abcd[hi]jkhilmnop as test data, hi(?!]) as the regex to find. It matched 'hi' without matching '[hi]'. Basically it matched the 'hi' so long as there was not a following ']' character.
This of course, can be expanded if needed. This has a benefit of not requiring any pre-processing for the string.

r"\[(.*)\]"
Just play arounds with this if you wanto to use regular expressions.

What do yo uwant to do with it? If you want to selectively replace parts like "hi" except when it's "[hi]", then I often use a system where I match what I want to avoid first and then what I want to watch; if it matches what I want to avoid then I return the match, otherwise I return the processed match.
Like this:
return string.replace(/(\[\w+\])|(\w+)/g, function(all, m1, m2) {return m1 || m2.toUpperCase()});
which, with the given string, returns:
"A BC DEFG HI [hi] JKL MNOP."
Thus: it replaces every word with uppercase (m1 is empty), except if the word is between square brackets (m1 is not empty).

This builds an array of all the strings contained in [ ]:
var regex = /\[([^\]]*)\]/;
var string = "A bc defg hi [hi] [jkl] mnop.";
var results=[], result;
while(result = regex.exec(string))
results.push(result[1]);
edit
To answer to the question, this regex returns the string less all is in [ ], and trim whitespaces:
"A bc defg [hi] mnop [jkl].".replace(/(\s{0,1})\[[^\]]*\](\s{0,1})/g,'$1')

Instead of skipping the match you can probably try something different - match everything but do not capture the string within square brackets (inclusive) with something like this:
var r = /(?:\[.*?[^\[\]]\])|(.)/g;
var result;
var str = [];
while((result = r.exec(s)) !== null){
if(result[1] !== undefined){ //true if [string] matched but not captured
str.push(result[1]);
}
}
console.log(str.join(''));
The last line will print parts of the string which do not match the [string] pattern. For example, when called with the input "A [bc] [defg] hi [hi] j[kl]u m[no]p." the code prints "A hi ju mp." with whitespaces intact.
You can try different things with this code e.g. replacing etc.

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.

assign matched values from jquery regex match to string variable

I am doing it wrong. I know.
I want to assign the matched text that is the result of a regex to a string var.
basically the regex is supposed to pull out anything in between two colons
so blah:xx:blahdeeblah
would result in xx
var matchedString= $(current).match('[^.:]+):(.*?):([^.:]+');
alert(matchedString);
I am looking to get this to put the xx in my matchedString variable.
I checked the jquery docs and they say that match should return an array. (string char array?)
When I run this nothing happens, No errors in the console but I tested the regex and it works outside of js. I am starting to think I am just doing the regex wrong or I am completely not getting how the match function works altogether

I checked the jquery docs and they say that match should return an array.
No such method exists for jQuery. match is a standard javascript method of a string. So using your example, this might be
var str = "blah:xx:blahdeeblah";
var matchedString = str.match(/([^.:]+):(.*?):([^.:]+)/);
alert(matchedString[2]);
// -> "xx"
However, you really don't need a regular expression for this. You can use another string method, split() to divide the string into an array of strings using a separator:
var str = "blah:xx:blahdeeblah";
var matchedString = str.split(":"); // split on the : character
alert(matchedString[1]);
// -> "xx"
String.match
String.split