I want to replace/delete any text (also with line breaks) that is between 2 javascript comments, but the forward-slashes make me headache.
What I have at the moment, but is not working:
var text="//beginTESTTESTTEST//end";
var regex = "/\//begin+(.)+\//end*/g";
console.log(text.replace(regex,""));
Expected output would be
"//begin//end"
Thank you
There are a couple of issues:
/regex_pattern/), it ruins the regex as the slashes become part of the pattern(.)+ makes little sense as the capturing group is placed around a . that matches any char but line break chars, and effectively, you capture the last char from the matched sequence. BUT: we capture what we need to keep, and we just match what we want to discard. Thus, put the (...) only around those parts you want to keeep, //begin and //end and use backreferences in the replacement part to restore these substrings in the result* is greedy, and in case there are more than one match in the string, .* will overmatch across several delimiters, so it is safer to use a lazy version, .*?. does not match line break chars, so it is better to use [^] (only in ECMAScript regex flavor), [\s\S] / [\d\D] / [\w\W], or use . with s flag (in the contemporary ECMAScript 2018+ compliant JS environments)/ are "special" and need escaping with \.So, here are a couple of possible fixes:
var text="//beginTESTTESTTEST//end";
// Capture the parts you need to keep and use backreferences in the replacement
console.log(text.replace(/(\/\/begin)[\w\W]*?(\/\/end)/g, "$1$2"));
// Just match the pattern and use a literal in the replacement
console.log(text.replace(/\/\/begin[\w\W]*?\/\/end/g, "//begin//end"));
str.replace(/(\/{2}begin)[^]*?(\/{2}end\b)/g, '$1$2');