Hi, I am relatively new to regex and have a simple question.

I want to find two words within a string (and everything in between to
the two words and replace it with something else.

The specific string is:

....[lots of
text]..................thumbnailUrl=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&..........................[more
text]



i want to snip out the everything in between and including

thumbnailUrl=

and the

&

and all the text in between the two words.  The text between the two
words is not a constant number and contains the % sign.

This is what I was thinking but its not working properly:

foo = foo.replace(/[thumbnailUrl=.*]-[&]/i, 'replacement text');

Can someone please help??

GCoder wrote:

>
> ...[lots of
> text]..................thumbnailUrl=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&..........................[more
> text]

>
> This is what I was thinking but its not working properly:
>
> foo = foo.replace(/[thumbnailUrl=.*]-[&]/i, 'replacement text');

I think you want

foo = foo.replace(/thumbnailUrl=.*?&/,"replacement text")

Maybe you still want the 'i' flag too if thumbnailUrl might be
capitalized differently.

- Peter

JRS:  In article <1144991557.121655.73250@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>,
dated Thu, 13 Apr 2006 23:14:08 remote, seen in
news:comp.lang.javascript, petermichaux@gmail.com posted :
>
>foo = foo.replace(/thumbnailUrl=.*?&/,"replacement text")
>

 foo = foo.replace(/thumbnailUrl=[^?]*&/, "replacement text")

may be safer.
 
-- 
 � John Stockton, Surrey, UK.  ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk   Turnpike v4.00   IE 4 �
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Dr John Stockton wrote:

> [...] petermichaux@gmail.com posted :
>> foo = foo.replace(/thumbnailUrl=.*?&/,"replacement text")
> 
>  foo = foo.replace(/thumbnailUrl=[^?]*&/, "replacement text")
> 
> may be safer.

But not equivalent.  Peter proposed non-greedy matching.
Probably you meant 

  foo = foo.replace(/thumbnailUrl=[^&]*&/, "replacement text")


PointedEars