Problem with Javascript RegExp-mask

Question

I have a string that looks something like this:

{theField} > YEAR (today, -3) || {theField}  < YEAR (today, +3)

I want it to be replaced into:

{theField} > " + YEAR (today, -3) + " || {theField}  < " + YEAR (today, +3) + "

I have tried this:

String.replace(/(.*)(YEAR|MONTH|WEEK|DAY+)(.*[)]+)/g, "$1 \" + $2 $3 + \"")

But that gives me:

{theField} > YEAR (today, +3) || {theField}  >  " + YEAR  (today, +3) + "

Does anyone have any ideas?

DAY+ matches DAYYYYYYYY. Don't know if it's what you want. — kennytm
– kennytm, Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 7:28

Mark Byers · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-02 08:02:00Z

You should be careful using greedy matching when you have .*. Usually this doesn't do what you want - it matches as much of the string as possible. You either need to use a negative character class to stop matching when you reach a certain character (e.g. [^)]) or else use a lazy match .*?. Here is how you could do it using the lazy quantifier:

s = '{theField} > YEAR (today, -3) || {theField}  < YEAR (today, +3)';
result = s.replace(/((YEAR|MONTH|WEEK|DAY).*?\))/g, '" + $1 + "')

Result:

{theField} > " + YEAR (today, -3) + " || {theField}  < " + YEAR (today, +3) + "

Note that I've cleaned up a bit in your regular expression:

Removed the + from DAY+ as KennyTM noted
Changed [)]+ to \)
Changed the literal replacement string from double-quoted to single-quoted so that the quotes in the replacement text don't need to be escaped
Removed the extra space you were putting into the result between YEAR and the following opening parenthesis

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