Develop Reference

JavaScript split string by specific character string

I have a text box with a bunch of comments, all separated by a specific character string as a means of splitting them to display each comment individually.
The string in question is | but I can change this to accommodate whatever will work. My only requirement is that it is not likely to be a string of characters someone will type in an everyday sentence.
I believe I need to use the split method and possibly some regex but all the other questions I've seen only seem to mention splitting by one character or a number of different characters, not a specific set of characters in a row.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

.split() should work for that purpose:
var comments = "this is a comment|and here is another comment|and yet another one";
var parsedComments = comments.split('|');
This will give you all comments in an array which you can then loop over or do whatever you have to do.
Keep in mind you could also change | to something like <--NEWCOMMENT--> and it will still work fine inside the split('<--NEWCOMMENT-->') method.
Remember that split() removes the character it's splitting on, so your resulting array won't contain any instances of <--NEWCOMMENT-->

JavaScript + RegEx Complications- Searching Strings Not Containing SubString

I am trying to use a RegEx to search through a long string, and I am having trouble coming up with an expression. I am trying to search through some HTML for a set of tags beginning with a tag containing a certain value and ending with a different tag containing another value. The code I am currently using to attempt this is as follows:
matcher = new RegExp(".*(<[^>]+" + startText + "((?!" + endText + ").)*" + endText + ")", 'g');
data.replace(matcher, "$1");
The strangeness around the middle ( ((\\?\\!endText).)* ) is borrowed from another thread, found here, that seems to describe my problem. The issue I am facing is that the expression matches the beginning tag, but it does not find the ending tag and instead includes the remainder of the data. Also, the lookaround in the middle slowed the expression down a lot. Any suggestions as to how I can get this working?
EDIT: I understand that parsing HTML in RegEx isn't the best option (makes me feel dirty), but I'm in a time-crunch and any other alternative I can think of will take too long. It's hard to say what exactly the markup I will be parsing will look like, as I am creating it on the fly. The best I can do is to say that I am looking at a large table of data that is collected for a range of items on a range of dates. Both of these ranges can vary, and I am trying to select a certain range of dates from a single row. The approximate value of startText and endText are \\#\\#ASSET_ID\\#\\#_<YYYY_MM_DD>. The idea is to find the code that corresponds to this range of cells. (This edit could quite possibly have made this even more confusing, but I'm not sure how much more information I could really give without explaining the entire application).
EDIT: Well, this was a stupid question. Apparently, I just forgot to add .* after the last paren. Can't believe I spent so long on this! Thanks to those of you that tried to help!

First of all, why is there a .* Dot Asterisk in the beginning? If you have text like the following:
This is my Text
And you want "my Text" pulled out, you do my\sText. You don't have to do the .*.
That being said, since all you'll be matching now is what you need, you don't need the main Capture Group around "Everything". This: .*(xxx) is a huge no-no, and can almost always be replaced with this: xxx. In other words, your regex could be replaced with:
<[^>]+xxx((?!zzz).)*zzz
From there I examine what it's doing.
You are looking for an HTML opening Delimeter <. You consume it.
You consume at least one character that is NOT a Closing HTML Delimeter, but can consume many. This is important, because if your tag is <table border=2>, then you have, at minimum, so far consumed <t, if not more.
You are now looking for a StartText. If that StartText is table, you'll never find it, because you have consumed the t. So replace that + with a *.
The regex is still success if the following is NOT the closing text, but starts from the VERY END of the document, because the Asterisk is being Greedy. I suggest making it lazy by adding a ?.
When the backtracking fails, it will look for the closing text and gather it successfully.
The result of that logic:
<[^>]*xxx((?!zzz).)*?zzz
If you're going to use a dot anyway, which is okay for new Regex writers, but not suggested for seasoned, I'd go with this:
<[^>]*xxx.*?zzz
So for Javascript, your code would say:
matcher = new RegExp("<[^>]*" + startText + ".*?" + endText, 'gi');
I put the IgnoreCase "i" in there for good measure, but you may or may not want that.

create an input using parseMath() in jqmath

I’ve to create a custom text field which is support some of the mathematical expression also. So I thought of using JQMath.
I’ve to pass a expression with html input field using javascript. It’ll be added dynamically. So I put the expression in a string which is changeable anytime. But if I use the string, it didn’t give the positive output. I googled a lot about this, but I cant get it. Please help me on this.
Below is my code.
var string = "$x={-b±√{b^2-4ac}}/{2a\html'<input size=1 >'}$"
var di = document.createElement("div");
di.innerHTML = string//+textStr;
document.body.appendChild(di);
M.parseMath(di)

The \ in the javascript quoted string source needs to be doubled \\ to produce a \ in the actual string. Alternatively, jqMath also supports ` backquote for its macros, to avoid this annoyance.
Jan, the library does support mathematical Unicode characters, and the main jqMath page at http://mathscribe.com/author/jqmath.html has a table to help you find and type them.

Hide characters in a string

I was wondering if there was a way to hide a string of characters in a string. I found Control Characters which work for hidding those characters:
>var hidden = "\26"
undefined
>hidden
""
>hidden.replace("\26","yolo");
"yolo"
>"".replace("\26","yolo");
""
but what i would like to escape a string of characters and have them not show up like this:
>var hidden = "\26cantseethis\26"
undefined
>hidden
""
Is there any such method using ASCII characters?
edit:
What I am trying to do is give state to a google doc. I have a workflow type google app script attached to a form that creates a doc. the doc is immediatly viewable by the administrator so i dont want to put a bunch of special strings like &UserOneAgreed in the doc, mostly because of the potential of someone going in and modifying that string. I have another script that will go in and modify the related text once some user input is gathered.

You cannot do that. The control character can be used for character only, so you will need to escape each character separately to hide them.

JavaScript automatically converts some special characters

I need to extract a HTML-Substring with JS which is position dependent. I store special characters HTML-encoded.
For example:
HTML
<div id="test"><p>lösen & grüßen</p></div>​
Text
lösen & grüßen
My problem lies in the JS-part, for example when I try to extract the fragment
lö, which has the HTML-dependent starting position of 3 and the end position of 9 inside the <div> block. JS seems to convert some special characters internally so that the count from 3 to 9 is wrongly interpreted as "lösen " and not "lö". Other special characters like the & are not affected by this.
So my question is, if someone knows why JS is behaving in that way? Characters like ä or ö are being converted while characters like & or are plain. Is there any possibility to avoid this conversion?
I've set up a fiddle to demonstrate this: JSFiddle
Thanks for any help!
EDIT:
Maybe I've explained it a bit confusing, sorry for that. What I want is the HTML:
<p>lösen & grüßen</p> .
Every special character should be unconverted, except the HTML-Tags. Like in the HTML above.
But JS converts the ö or ü into ö or ü automatically, what I need to avoid.

That's because the browser (and not JavaScript) turns entities that don't need to be escaped in HTML into their respective Unicode characters (e.g. it skips &, < and >).
So by the time you inspect .innerHTML, it no longer contains exactly what was in the original page source; you could reverse this process, but it involves the full map of character <-> entity pairs which is just not practical.

If i understand you correctly, then try use innerHTML or .html('your html code') for jQuery on the target element