find text wrapped in brackets in jQuery

Question

I have some text on a page and I want to located and remove any text found in brackets. For example:

<td>here is [my text] that I want to look at</td>

So I want to grab that text (my text), save it in a variable and remove it from where it is.

Answer 1

If you're using jQuery you could use a regular expression like \[(.+)\] on $('body').text().

EDIT: Sorry, I might have jumped the gun a little bit giving you this answer. Going to think about it for a few more minutes and try to update this with a little more info.

Answer 2

You may find that this task is not all that simple. If you have control over the text before it is sent to the web browser you may want to put a <span class='bracket'>[my text]</span> around the text, then you could easily do something like this with jQuery:

$(".bracket").each(function() {
  // store the data from $(this).text();
}).remove();

This can be done using regular expressions and jQuery, but there are problems that may creep up dealing with text inside of attributes like <input name='test[one][]' /> The "simple" regex would be to do something like this:

$("td").each(function() {
  var $this = $(this);

  var html = $this.html();
  var bracketText = [];

  // match all bracketed text in the html - replace with an empty string
  // but push the text on to the array.

  html = html.replace(/\[([^\]]+)\]/g, function() { 
    bracketText.push(arguments[1]);
    return "";
  });

  // put the new html in away and save the data for later
  $this.html(html).data("bracketText", bracketText);
});

There is not much danger in doing this if you're sure you wont have [] inside of tags other than in the text.

Answer 3

I ended up doing the following:

      $('#formQuizAnswers td.question').each(function(){
         var header = $(this).text().match(/-.*-/);
         $(this).text($(this).text().replace(header,''));
});

I changed my text I search for to have dashes around it IE -My text-