JavaScript/Regex params with different values

Question

I'm a little lost when it comes to more advanced or lengthy Regex to be honest. I have a query string that I need to match and get the values and the name of query params. The difficulty for me is that the value can be different values and there are, currently, only 4 different query params. Here is an example query string:

foo title:"Foo Bar" -title:other author: (mitchell* OR mike) from:2012-01-01 to: 2012-06-01

The query params are title, author, from and to. The three different values are within double-quotes "Foo Bar", surrounded with parenthesis (mitchell* OR mike) or a single value 2012-01-01 or other. Notice there is an optional space after the colon also. There also could be a + or - before each param name, -title. The title and author values can have the wildcard.

I'm currently not interested in parsing the value like I don't need to parse (mitchell* or mike) to know what's in it, just want to display it as a whole.

How can I, with Regex, parse this string to get the value to the param name that goes along with it?

I can deal with result like:

['title:"Foo Bar"', '-title:other', 'author: (mitchell* OR mike)', 'from:2012-01-01', 'to:2012-06-01']

I do not need to worry about the value that doesn't have a param name like the foo at the beginning (which could be anywhere in the string), just need to get the param name and value.

I can do whatever I need to do to accomplish what I need. If that means parsing something first and then doing something that's fine. Never said it was a request string, I used the terms that could make you think it was like params but it's a string that gets fed into a search server but I want to parse this "query string" for the UI. — Mitchell Simoens
– Mitchell Simoens, Commented Aug 6, 2012 at 16:31

Evandro Silva · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-06 16:07:38Z

1

Joseph is right. The data you're giving is very messy, to make it in one regex would be too complicated, IMO, the best way I could think of this is applying 3 different expressions, one for each type you want to search for:

This searches for items starting with left bracket:

-?\w+:\s*\((.*?)\)

This searches for items starting with double quotes:

-?\w+:\s*"(.*?)"

This searches for other items (items with spaces won't work):

-?\w+:\s*([^\s"\(]+)

Probably, there is an easier way of doing it, but this is the way I would do it.

answered Aug 6, 2012 at 16:07

Evandro Silva

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3 Comments

Mitchell Simoens Over a year ago

I have full control and don't mind doing it in multiple if that's the only way. I wouldn't really say it's messy, it's flexible but like the saying goes, you say tomato, I say tomato (looses context just typing)

Mitchell Simoens Over a year ago

These work except if there are multiple matches in each regex. For instance if I add '-title:test' in there, the 3rd one should technically match both -title:other and -title:test but it returns only the first. Once we get that going then you have answered this perfectly!

Mitchell Simoens Over a year ago

Nevermind, revisited and added g for global and it matched it all. Thanks!

Mitchell Simoens · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-06 22:13:09Z

0

This regexp does what I was wanting:

/-?\w+:\s*([^\s"\(]+|"(.*?)"|\((.*?)\))/g

Returns:

["title:"Foo Bar"", "-title:other", "author: (mitchell* OR mike)", "from:2012-01-01", "to: 2012-06-01"]

as am wanting!

answered Aug 6, 2012 at 22:13

Mitchell Simoens

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